Thursday, April 28th
2:30 PM-
C-202: Academic Session (Academic Track)
Paper Title: Gimbal: Enabling Multi-tenant Storage Disaggregation on SmartNIC JBOFs

Paper Abstract: Emerging SmartNIC-based disaggregated NVMe storage has become a promising storage infrastructure due to its competitive IO performance and low cost. These SmartNIC JBOFs are shared among multiple co-resident applications, and there is a need for the platform to ensure fairness, QoS, and high utilization. Unfortunately, given the limited computing capability of the SmartNICs and the non-deterministic nature of NVMe drives, it is challenging to provide such support on today’s SmartNIC JBOFs. In this talk, I'll present Gimbal, a software storage switch that orchestrates IO traffic between Ethernet ports and NVMe drives for co-located tenants. It enables efficient multi-tenancy on SmartNIC JBOFs using the following techniques: a delay-based SSD congestion control algorithm, dynamic estimation of SSD write costs, a fair scheduler that operates at the granularity of a virtual slot, and an end-to-end credit-based flow control channel. Our prototyped system not only achieves up to x6.6 better utilization and 62.6% less tail latency but also improves the fairness for complex workloads.

Paper Author: Jaehong Min, Graduate Student, University of Washington

Author Bio: Jaehong Min is a graduate student from University of Washington, advised by Arvind Krishnamurthy. He is also a software engineer at Samsung. His research interest is storage disaggregation.