Multi-Host Sharing of a Single-Function NVMe Device in a PCIe Cluster

Distributed cluster applications, including machine learning tasks, database applications, and HPC workloads, often rely on NVMe-oF using RDMA for fast, block-level access to storage devices over a network. However, RDMA solutions add extra latency by requiring software on the critical path. In this paper, we present a distributed NVMe driver for sharing NVMe storage devices across hosts in a PCIe cluster. By building on PCIe shared memory capabilities, we demonstrate disaggregation of NVMe controllers at the I/O queue level, allowing them to be used in parallel by remote hosts without relying on RDMA. Our experimental results prove that our PCIe-based solution reduces network latency and is comparable to local access.