Paper Title: NVMe over Fabrics: Scaling Up with the Storage Performance Development Kit

Paper Abstract: The Storage Performance Development Kit (SPDK) Project released an open source NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) software target when the NVMe-oF specification was released in 2016. The target has been improved to ensure linear scaling with the addition of CPU cores, NICs, and NVMe devices, all while maintaining the low latency characteristics of RDMA. Many challenges were encountered during the development of the SPDK NVMe-oF target including: • Keeping connections independent to enable a lock-free I/O path • Maintaining mutable NVMe subsystem state and cross-thread coordination • Effectively leveraging hardware features in RDMA NICs and Fibre Channel HBAs • Challenges created by the NVMe over Fabrics protocol itself Benchmark tests illustrate scaling behaviors in the latest NVMe over Fabrics target against a range of variables including the number of connections, the number of subsystems, and the number of NICs, CPU cores, and NVMe SSDs.

Paper Author: Ben Walker, Storage Solutions Architect, Intel

Author Bio: Ben Walker is a Storage Solutions Architect at Intel, where he is the technical lead for the Storage Performance Development Kit (SPDK). As Technical Lead, he manages additions and revisions, reviews code, does performance analysis, and handles testing, code quality control, and documentation. He was previously the technical lead for Intel Rapid Storage Technology, where he implemented NVMe support. Before joining Intel, Ben worked on software projects ranging from particle physics simulation to high frequency securities trading. He earned a BS in physics from Arizona State University. He has presented on SPDK at many events, including SPDK Summit and Flash Memory Summit. He holds a patent in I/O queue management.