Computational Storage

Offloading processing to storage is a means to avoid data movement and thus deal efficiently with very large volumes of stored data. In the 90s, there were pioneering efforts to develop Processing-in-Memory as well as Active Disks. We are considering data stored on Open-Channel SSDs with a programmable storage controller (i.e., a Linux-based ARM processor) integrated into a network switch (e.g., Broadcom Stingray or NXP LS2). Topics for thesis include (1) the design/implementation and evaluation of a prototype key-value store running on the storage controller, (2) the design/implementation/evaluation of a 100GB Ethernet-based RPC connection between host and storage controller, and (3) the development of a new recovery scheme for a user-space Flash Translation Layer embedded on the storage controller.