Explore the vast range of titles available.

Modern High-End Computing systems frequently include FPGAs as compute accelerators. These programmable logic devices now support disk controller IP cores which offer the ability to introduce new, innovative functionalities that, previously, were not practical. This article describes one such innovation: a filesystem implemented in hardware. This has the potential of improving the performance of data-intensive applications by connecting secondary storage directly to FPGA compute accelerators. To test the feasibility of this idea, a Hardware Filesystem was designed with four basic operations (open, read, write, and delete). Furthermore, multi-disk and RAID-0 (striping) support has been implemented as an option in the filesystem. A RAM Disk core was created to emulate a SATA disk drive so results on running FPGA systems could be readily measured. By varying the block size from 64 to 4096 bytes, it was found that 1024 bytes gave the best performance while using a very modest 7% of a Xilinx XC4VFX60's slices and only four (of the 232) BRAM blocks available.

Modern High-End Computing systems frequently include FPGAs as compute accelerators. These programmable logic devices now support disk controller IP cores which offer the ability to introduce new, innovative functionalities that, previously, were not practical. This article describes one such innovation: a filesystem implemented in hardware. This has the potential of improving the performance of data-intensive applications by connecting secondary storage directly to FPGA compute accelerators. To test the feasibility of this idea, a Hardware Filesystem was designed with four basic operations (open, read, write, and delete). Furthermore, multi-disk and RAID-0 (striping) support has been implemented as an option in the filesystem. A RAM Disk core was created to emulate a SATA disk drive so results on running FPGA systems could be readily measured. By varying the block size from 64 to 4096 bytes, it was found that 1024 bytes gave the best performance while using a very modest 7% of a Xilinx XC4VFX60's slices and only four (of the 232) BRAM blocks available.

As secondary storage devices get faster with flash based solid state drives (SSDs) and emerging technologies like phase change memories (PCM), overheads in system software like operating system (OS) and filesystem become prominent and may limit the potential performance improvements. Moreover, with rapidly increasing on-chip core count, monolithic operating systems will face scalability issues on these many-core chips. Future operating systems are likely to have a distributed nature, with a separation of operating system services amongst cores. Also, general purpose processors are known to be both performance and power inefficient while executing operating system code. In the domain of High Performance Computing with FPGAs too, relying on the OS for file I/O transactions using slow embedded processors, hinders performance. Migrating the filesystem into a dedicated hardware core, has the potential of improving the performance of data-intensive applications by bypassing the OS stack to provide higher bandwdith and reduced latency while accessing disks. To test the feasibility of this idea, an FPGA-based Hardware Filesystem (HWFS) was designed with five basic operations (open, read, write, delete and seek). Furthermore, multi-disk and RAID-0 (striping) support has been implemented as an option in the filesystem. In order to reduce design complexity and facilitate easier testing of the HWFS, a RAM disk was used initially. The filesystem core has been integrated and tested with a hardware application core (BLAST) as well as a multi-node FPGA network to provide remote-disk access. Finally, a SATA IP core was developed and directly integrated with HWFS to test with SSDs. For evaluation, HWFS's performance was compared to an Ext2 filesystem, both on an FPGA-based soft processor as well as a modern AMD Opteron Linux server with sequential and random workloads. Results prove that the Hardware Filesystem and supporting infrastructure provide substantial performance improvement over software only systems. The system is also resource efficient consuming less than 3% of logic and 5% of the Block RAMs of a Xilinx Virtex-6 chip.