Paper Title: Accelerating data services and storage disaggregation thanks to DPUs

Paper Abstract: NVMe protocol is state-of-the-art technology that enhances the performance benefits of flash-based storage by removing performance bottlenecks. To fully exploit the performances of NVMe devices, storage nodes must dedicate significant portions of compute resources towards storage functions. This is especially true when storage services such as LVM, data protection, data reduction or data cryptography are employed. Performance of both local and NVMeoF based disaggregated storage are adversely affected by system bottlenecks which reduces the expected benefits to TCO of modern NVMe architectures. This is amplified further in a virtualized environment, where hypervisors must offer storage virtualization and disaggregation to Virtual Machines. In this presentation we will detail the benefits of using DPUs: demonstrating how DPU-based acceleration cards like the Kalray Smart Storage Accelerator PCIe card can seamlessly offload storage services as well as storage disaggregation by exposing many NVMe controllers on the PCIe bus while taking control of local or remote SSDs and share concrete outcomes for the most demanding workflows in domains such as AI, HPC and High-End Media Production.

Paper Author: Tim Lieber, Lead Solution Architect, Kalray

Author Bio: Rémy Gauguey is a Senior Software Architect at Kalray, for the Data Center Business Unit. He has more than 25 years of experience in the high-tech industry, with strong expertise in SoCs, RTOS and high-performance packet processing. He develops advanced architectures for composable infrastructure, leveraging the MPPA® manycore technology from Kalray. Rémy has been previously developing his expertise at Conexant, Mindspeed Technologies and the CEA labs. He holds several patents in the fields of software architecture and packet processing