Workshops Archive

SNAcc: An Open-Source Framework for Streaming-based Network-to-Storage Accelerators

Workshop: 11th International Workshop on Heterogeneous High-Performance Reconfigurable Computing (H2RC 2025)

Authors: David Volz, Torben Kalkhof, and Andreas Koch (Technical University of Darmstadt)

Abstract: Network accessible databases are a common use case in modern data centers, often paired with pre-processing before storing results for later use. However, general purpose CPUs struggle to keep up with current Ethernet line speeds. Furthermore, in such a compute pipeline, the CPU is mostly used to manage storage accesses, wasting compute resources and communication bandwidth.

Due to their wide data path, FPGAs are very suitable for network applications. Hence, we propose an open-source framework for the seamless high-performance integration of custom FPGA-based network-to-storage accelerators. Our solution leverages the flexible communication interfaces of FPGAs, namely Ethernet and PCIe for direct access to NVMe storage, without host CPU interaction. We are able to saturate the bandwidth of both 100G Ethernet and state-of-the-art SSDs, and demonstrate our implementation in a case study performing DNN-based classification on an image stream.

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