[UIUC HACC Seminar] VersatileSSD: Breaking I/O Barrier by Leveraging SmartSSD

Abstract

Modern server systems are facing the challenge of meeting the increasingly demanding performance requirements of applications that process massive amounts of data, such as databases, machine learning, and data analytics. Solid-state drives (SSDs) have grown in popularity due to their ability to significantly reduce the time required for transferring huge amounts of data, resulting in a shift in the system bottleneck from data transfer to interconnect bandwidth and operating system overhead. However, as the PCIe places limitations on simultaneous I/O device access, the scalability of the system is limited when multiple I/O devices are servicing independent contexts of I/O operations. This issue, along with the long-latency interconnect bus data transfer, has led to the development of SmartSSD, which employs near-data processing (NDP) to move computations closer to the location where the data is stored. This presentation outlines our vision for leveraging SmartSSD to maximize its computing potential and versatility in the context of NDP. Specifically, we will discuss two approaches that we are currently exploring: 1) Universal predicate pushdown and 2) OS page cache expander. We will present the high-level concepts behind these approaches and outline our development plan, which we believe will pave the way for integrating SmartSSD into mainstream server systems.