NASCENT: Near-Storage Acceleration of Database Sort on SmartSSD

Abstract

As the size of data generated every day grows dramatically, the computational bottleneck of computer systems has been shifted toward the storage devices. Thanks to recent developments in storage devices, the interface between the storage and the computational platforms has become the main limitation as it provides limited bandwidth which does not scale when the number of storage devices increases. Interconnect networks limit the performance of the system when independent operations are executing on different storage devices since they do not provide simultaneous accesses to all the storage devices. Offloading the computations to the storage devices eliminates the burden of data transfer from the interconnects. Emerging as a nascent computing trend, near storage computing offloads a portion of computation to the storage devices to accelerate the big data applications. In this paper, we propose a near storage accelerator for database sort, NASCENT, which utilizes Samsung SmartSSD, an NVMe flash drive with an on-board FPGA chip that processes data in-situ. We propose, to the best of our knowledge, the first near storage database sort based on bitonic sort which considers the specifications of the storage devices to increase the scalability of computer systems as the number of storage devices increases. NASCENT improves both performance and energy efficiency as the number of storage devices increases. With 12 SmartSSDs, NASCENT is 7.6x (147.2x) faster and 5.6x (131.4x) more energy efficient than the FPGA (CPU) baseline.