Orchestrating Near-Data FPGA Accelerators Using Unix Pipes

Near-data accelerators play an important role in satisfying the ever growing demand for compute resources. However, for an efficient integration of near-data computing resources into applications, a flexible programming model and suitable abstractions on the operating system level are required. This paper presents Metal FS, a framework that enables users and applications to orchestrate computations on a NVMe+FPGA near-data computing device through standard shell syntax, including the pipe operator. A user-space NVMe file system interface exposes the storage resources of the NVMe+FPGA accelerator. Computation pipelines expressed on the shell are mapped to pre-defined functional elements of a coarse-grained FPGA overlay, enabling data transformations to be performed in proximity to the data source. Overall, Metal FS greatly increases developer productivity for applications targeting near-data computing accelerators.