A rack-size BlueDBM system is likely to be an order of magnitude cheaper and less power hungry than a cluster with enough DRAM to accommodate 10TB to 20TB of data. For example, our 20-node BlueDBM platform can accommodate 20TB of data,
while more than 100 comparable machines would be required to accommodate the same amount of data in DRAM. Additionally, while the performance of DRAM-centric systems falls rapidly if even a small fraction of data has to reside in secondary storage, this problem is greatly mitigated in a BlueDBM-like architecture because flash-based systems with 10TB to 20TB of storage are very affordable