In the last Computer Architecture class, it was mentioned that it is easier to find information about the evolution of processors (e.g. number of transistors, performance, etc) than finding the equivalent information about disk and/or memory. This is very interesting because I was wondering about something similar approximately a month ago.

The question in my head was: "Why does not exist a TOP500 ranking of the High Performance Storage infrastructures?".

They have published the www.top500.org highlighting the processing power for years, but few details are included about the storage systems which come together these powerful machines.

Recently, I have found that the IEEE Computer Society Mass Storage Systems Technical Committee is sponsoring an initiative to develop the TOP100io (http://top100io.org/) which is still in the "Call for Contributors" phase.

Particularly, considering that several distributed computational architectures are built today to tackle huge data intensive problems, this ranking might be relevant in guiding future research on high performance storage systems design and performance analysis.