DeLiBA: An Open-Source Hardware/Software Framework for the Development of Linux Block I/O Accelerators

With the trend towards ever larger “big data” applications, many of the gains achievable by using specialized compute accelerators become diminished due to the growing I/O overheads. While there have been a number of research efforts into computational storage and FPGA implementations of the NVMe interface, to our knowledge there have been only very limited efforts to move larger parts of the Linux block I/O stack into FPGA-based hardware accelerators. Our hardware/software framework DeLiBA aims to address this deficiency by allowing high-productivity development of software components of the I/O stack in user instead of kernel space, and leverages a proven FPGA SoC framework to quickly compose and deploy the actual FPGA-based I/O accelerators. While the current version of DeLiBA is focused on enabling more productive research instead of on raw performance, even in its current form it achieves 10% higher throughput and up to 2.3x the I/Os per second for a proof-of-concept Ceph accelerator realized using the system. These initial results show the large potential of performing further research in this acceleration domain.