Low-power storage bricks and bioinformatics on Systems-On-Chip

Low-power Systems on Chip (SoCs) derived from the embedded and mobile market can be profitably used to execute scientific workloads traditionally designed for power-hungry clusters, saving energy, gaining portability and reducing infrastructural costs and sizes. We investigate the possibility of using SoCs as storage bricks of a BeeGFS filesystem in the perspective of energy-efficient storage solutions supporting scientific computing. Then, we consider a use case from metagenomics analysis and show how the large amount of genome sequencing information streamed by portable sequencing devices could be managed by low-power SoCs making use of an underlying BeeGFS filesystem.