In-storage Processing of I/O Intensive Applications on Computational Storage Drives

Computational storage drives (CSD) are solid-state drives (SSD) empowered by general-purpose processors that can perform in-storage processing. They have the potential to improve both performance and energy significantly for big-data analytics by bringing compute to data, thereby eliminating costly data transfer while offering better privacy. In this work, we introduce Solana, the first-ever high-capacity(12-TB) CSD in E1.S form factor, and present an actual prototype for evaluation. To demonstrate the benefits of in-storage processing on CSD, we deploy several natural language processing (NLP) applications on datacenter-grade storage servers comprised of clusters of the Solana. Experimental results show up to 3.1x speedup in processing while reducing the energy consumption and data transfer by 67% and 68%, respectively, compared to regular enterprise SSDs.