Eusocial Storage: Quantifying the Benefits of Offloading to Smart Storage Devices

Research Fellow: Jianshen Liu

Advisor: Carlos Maltzahn

Collaborators: Philip Kufeldt (Seagate), Ken Iizawa (Fujitsu Labs), Paul von Stamwitz (Fujitsu), Nidish Kamath (Kioxia), Matthew Curry (Sandia National Labs)

Overview

As storage devices get faster, data management tasks rob the host of CPU cycles and main memory bandwidth. In this article, we examine a new interface to storage devices that can leverage existing and new CPU and main memory resources to take over data management tasks like availability, recovery, and migrations. This new interface provides a roadmap for device-to-device interactions and more powerful storage devices capable of providing in-store compute services that can dramatically improve performance. We call such storage devices “eusocial” because we are inspired by eusocial insects like ants, termites, and bees, which as individuals are primitive but collectively accomplish amazing things.

Publications

• Jianshen Liu, Matthew Curry, Carlos Maltzahn, Philip Kufeldt, “Scale-out Edge Storage Systems with Embedded Storage Nodes to Get Better Availability and Cost-Efficiency At the Same Time,” HotEdge '20.
• Jianshen Liu, Design Considerations of Eliminating External Caching Effects for MBWU Construction, CROSS Blog, December 2019
• Jianshen Liu, Philip Kufeldt, Carlos Maltzahn, MBWU: Benefit Quantification for Data Access Function Offloading, In Weiland M., Juckeland G., Alam S., Jagode H. (eds) High Performance Computing. ISC High Performance 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 11887. Springer, Cham
• Philip Kufeldt, Carlos Maltzahn, Tim Feldman, Christine Green, Grant Mackey, and Shingo Tanaka, "Eusocial Storage Devices: Offloading Data Management to Storage Devices that Can Act Collectively," ;login: The USENIX Magazine, Summer 2018, Vol. 43, No. 2