Accessible Near -Storage Computing with FPGAs

Data transfers impose a major bottleneck in heterogenous system architectures. As a mitigation strategy, compute resources can be introduced in places where data occurs naturally. The increased diversity of compute resources in turn affects programming models and practicalities of software development for near-data compute kernels and raises the question of how those resources can be made accessible to users and applications. We introduce the Metal FS framework to improve the accessibility of FPGA-based near-storage accelerators: Firstly, we present a near-storage-compute-aware file system that enables self-contained, reusable compute kernels to operate on the granularity of file data streams. Secondly, we provide an integrated build process for FPGA overlay images that starts with the acquisition of compute kernels through a package manager and finally allows to dynamically configure near-storage compute pipelines consisting of them. Thirdly, we integrate the framework into Linux as a file system driver and repurpose UNIX Pipes as a well-known operating system primitive to orchestrate near -storage compute pipelines.