Design and Implementation of Network Attached Storage Servers with the IBM Cell Platform

Network Attached Storage (NAS) servers are popular nowadays for sharing storage over the network. In recent years, NAS manufacturers took advantage of the System-on-Chip (SoC) technologies to reduce the cost of NAS servers and integrated many value-add features to attract customers. Value-add features such as peer-to-peer (P2P) applications, photo viewers, media players, and surveillance applications are offered by an entry-level NAS product on the market today. Overall, cost/performance ratios, administrative convenience, value-add features, and data security are the factors that influence the design and the user experience on NAS servers.he Sony PlayStation 3 (PS3) is a home multimedia and game console with a powerful IBM Cell processor and a Blu-ray Disc reader, in a compact package which costs about the same as an entry-level NAS server. With a much faster processor, the PS3 outperforms the similarily priced Synology DS-207+ in many applications, but misses a NAS functionality.n this thesis, we present the design and implementation of a NAS server with the PS3. In addition to the common features seen on NAS servers, we utilized the Synergistic Processing Elements (SPE) in the IBM Cell processor to accelerate compute-intensive applications. Our work successfully integrated NAS services and accelerated features on the PS3, and our results show that the PS3 offers higher cost/performance for surveillance and multimedia than similarly priced NAS servers. For accelerating of face detection with using 0 SPE as the baseline, we get at most 9.52 speedup.EYWORDS: NAS, PlayStation 3, IBM Cell processor, P2P, surveillance.