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.