Low Overhead & Energy Efficient Storage Path for Next Generation Computer Systems.

The rise of social networks along with the growth of big data have driven storage systems to cope with large scale of data volume. In recent years, the emergence of the Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) standard has enabled SSD drives to deliver high I/O rates by leveraging the fastest available interconnect (i.e. PCIe) to the processing chip. Additionally, the appearance of FPGAs in data centres is creating opportunities to accelerate not only application functionality but also OS operations. Although the majority of the servers in data centres have been connected to the FPGAs via the PCIe interconnect, there are now also available heterogeneous System on Chips (SoCs) with multi-cores and FPGAs integrated on the same die, resulting in low latency and energy efficient communication. This work analyses the source of performance overhead in existing state-of-the-art storage devices and proposes a novel low overhead and energy efficient storage path called FastPath, that operates transparently to the processing cores. The experimental results showed that FastPath can achieve up to 82% lower latency, up to 12x higher performance, and up to 10x more energy efficiency for standard microbenchmark on an Arm-FPGA Zynq 7000 SoC. Further experiments were conducted on a state-of-the-art SoC, such as the Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC, using a real application, such as the Redis in-memory database, which received requests by the Yahoo! Cloud Serving Benchmark (YCSB). The experimental evaluation showed that FastPath achieved up to 60% lower latency and 15% higher throughput than the baseline storage path in the Linux kernel.

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