An FPGA based Network Interface Card with Query Filter for Storage Nodes of Big Data Systems

Abstract

In this paper, we are interested in improving the data processing of storage and computing separated Big Data systems. We propose an Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) based Network Interface Card with Query Filter (NIC-QF) to accelerate the data query efficiency of storage nodes and reduce the workloads of computing nodes and the communication overheads between them. NIC-QF designed with PCIe core, query filter and NIC communication can filter the original data on storage nodes as an implicit coprocessor and directly send the filtered data to computing nodes of Big Data systems. Filter units in query filter can perform multiple SQL tasks in parallel, and each filter unit is internally pipelined, which can further speed up the data processing. Filter units can be designed to support general SQL queries on different data formats and we implement two schemes for TextFile and RCFile separately. Based on TPC-H benchmark and Tencent data set, we conduct extensive experiments to evaluate our design, which can achieve averagely up to 46.91% faster than the traditional approach.