Swift-X: Accelerating OpenStack Swift with RDMA for Building an Efficient HPC Cloud

Running Big Data applications in the cloud has become extremely popular in recent times. To enable the storage of data for these applications, cloud-based distributed storage solutions are a must. OpenStack Swift is an object storage service which is widely used for such purposes. Swift is one of the main components of the OpenStack software package. Although Swift has become extremely popular in recent times, its proxy server based design limits the overall throughput and scalability of the cluster. Swift is based on the traditional TCP/IP sockets based communication which has known performance issues such as context-switch and buffer copies for each message transfer. Modern high-performance interconnects such as InfiniBand and RoCE offer advanced features such as RDMA and provide high bandwidth and low latency communication. In this paper, we propose two new designs to improve the performance and scalability of Swift. We propose changes to the Swift architecture and operation design. We propose high-performance implementations of network communication and I/O modules based on RDMA to provide the fastest possible object transfer. In addition, we use efficient hashing algorithms to accelerate object verification in Swift. Experimental evaluations with microbenchmarks, Swift stack benchmark (ssbench), and synthetic application workloads reveal up to 2x and 7.3x performance improvement with our two proposed designs for put and get operations. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work towards accelerating OpenStack Swift with RDMA over high-performance interconnects in the literature.