SmartSSD: FPGA Accelerated Near-Storage Data Analytics on SSD

Faced with the increasing disparity between SSD throughput and CPU-based compute capabilities, there have been growing interests to move compute closer to storage and accelerate the data analytic workloads. In this letter, we propose SmartSSD, an SSD with onboard FPGA, which enables offloading computation within SSD. We perform a detailed model-based evaluation to evaluate the end-to-end performance and energy benefit of SmartSSD for the representative data analytic workloads with Spark SQL and Parquet columnar data format. Our evaluation shows that SmartSSD has the potential to have a transformative impact when building a high performance data analytic system, which enables 3.04x performance improvement and consuming only 45.8 percent of energy compared to the conventional CPU-based approach.