Data-Intensive Systems on Evolving Memory Hierarchies

New memory technologies with radically different properties are appearing. A substantial hardware and architectural redesign is required if they are to be used energy and performance efficient in a high-performance data-intensive system. In this paper we explore different alternatives and claim that the changing memory hierarchy and the challange for their energy efficient usage at the software layer disruptively impact the architecture and algorithms in any data-intensive system; direct control of the raw storage media is required yielding different hardware interfaces and software layers; data placement and versioning are emerging as new research fields promising most efficient usage in terms of performance and energy consumption.