R&D: DeLiBA-K, Speeding-up Hardware-Accelerated Distributed Storage Access by Tighter Linux Kernel Integration and Use of Modern API

ACM Digital Library has published, in SC-W ’24: Proceedings of the SC ’24 Workshops of the International Conference on High Performance Computing, Network, Storage, and Analysis, an article written by Babar Khan, and Andreas Koch, Embedded Systems and Applications Group, TU Darmstadt, Germany.

Abstract: “We present DeLiBA-K, an improved version of the Development of Linux Block I/O Accelerators (DeLiBA) framework. DeLiBA-K operates at the Linux kernel level, bypassing the user-space interactions of DeLiBA-1 and -2 to interact with the block and network I/O kernel stack directly. Another critical feature of DeLiBA-K is implementing and benchmarking the modern io_uring Asynchronous I/O (AIO) API within a 16nm AMD Alveo U280 FPGA I/O framework. This allows for better parallelism and reduced latency in I/O operations. Our results show significant performance gains, up to a 3.2x improvement in I/O operations per second (IOPS) and 3.45x increased throughput for synthetic workloads. Real-world applications see a 30% reduction in execution time for data-intensive tasks. DeLiBA-K has been successfully tested in an industrial environment using real workloads, demonstrating its effectiveness in large-scale enterprise environments.“