Benchmarking ARM-based storage controllers for disaggregated storage

Disaggregated storage has gained acceptance in data centers. With disaggregated storage, storage resources are decoupled from compute resources, and made available through fabric. We are particularly interested in storage resources composed of an ARM-based smartNIC, which acts as fabric target as well as storage controller for a collection of SSDs.

The performance characteristics of the storage stack are well understood on x86, but not on ARMv8. The goal of this project (research + MSc) is to (i) compile and run various forms of storage stack on ARM cores, (ii) make the storage stacks available through fabric (at present, SPDK does not run on ARM) and (iii) benchmark these storage stacks to identify bottlenecks and potential for hardware acceleration.