Accelerating Applications with NVM Express™ Computational Storage 2019 NVMe™ Annual Members Meeting and Developer Day March 19, 2019 Prepared by Stephen Bates, CTO, Eideticom & Richard Mataya, Co-Founder & EVP, NGD Systems

Agenda What?? Why?? Who?? How??

WHAT??

NVMe™ is a transport Michael Corwell, GM Storage, Microsoft Azure, Dec 5th 2018

One Driver to Rule Them All?! NVMe™ has been incredibly successful as a storage protocol. Also being used for networking (NVMe-oF™ and things like AWS Nitro and Mellanox’s Sexy NVMe Accelerator Platform (SNAP)). Why not extend NVMe to compute and make it the one driver to rule them all?

What is Computational Storage? SNIA has Defined the Following Computational Storage Drive (CSD): A component that provides persistent data storage and computational services Computational Storage Processor (CSP): A component that provides computational services to a storage system without providing persistent storage Computational Storage Array (CSA): A collection of computational storage drives, computational storage processors and/or storage devices, combined with a body of control software

WHY??

Real question is “Why not NVMe?” Why NVMe™? Accelerators require: Low latency High throughput Low CPU overhead Multicore awareness Management at scale QoS awareness NVMe provides: Low latency High throughput Low CPU overhead Multicore awareness Management at scale QoS awareness Real question is “Why not NVMe?”

Let’s Go Fishing for Data

NVMe™ Computational Storage CPU NVMe based Computational Storage Processor (CSP) advertises zlib compression. Operating System detects the presence of the NVMe CSP Used by the device-mapper to offload zlib compression to NoLoad. This can be combined with p2pdma to further offload IO. With standardization this can be vendor- neutral and upstreamed. DRAM PCIe Subsystem . . . CMB NVMe CSP NVMe SSDs

NVMe-oF™ Computational Storage An NVMe™ CSP is represented as an NVMe Computation Namespace. Therefore it can be exposed over Fabrics. Compute nodes can borrow CSPs, CSDs and standard NVMe SSDs via fabrics from Computational Storage Arrays (CSAs). NVMe Computational Storage can use the same fabrics commands that are used by legacy NVMe-oF. Application code is identical regardless Computation is local (PCIe) or remote (Fabrics) Ethernet TOR Switch Compute Node Compute Node Compute Node Computational Storage Array NVMe CSPs, CSDs and SSDs

Example of a Hadoop Cluster - In-Situ Processing Ability to Migrate Data Nodes into drives Allow for user to reduce CPU Core count Current example:

Network Monitoring Offload

WHO?

SNIA Computational Storage TWG

HOW?

NVMe™ for Computation: Software Management nvme-cli nvme-of Applications Userspace libcsnvme SPDK OS Hardware NVMe CSPs, CSDs and CSAs 18

NVMe™ for Computation: Standards NVMe Computation Namespaces: A new namespace type with its own namespace ID, command set and admin commands. Operating Systems can treat these namespaces different to storage namespaces. Fixed Purpose Computation: Some computation can be defined a way that an Operating System can consume it directly (e.g. zlib compression tied into the crypto API in Linux). General Purpose Computation: Some Computation Namespaces will be flexible and can be programmed and used in user-space (/dev/nvmeXcsY anyone?) NVMe Computation over Fabrics: User-space does not know or care if /dev/nvmeXcsY is local (PCIe) or remote (Fabrics)

There are many paths to Computational Storage

Processor Path in an NGD Systems NVMe™ SSD It’s an NVMe SSD at the core No impact on host read/write No impact on NVMe driver Standard protocols But then there is MORE (Patented IP) Dedicated compute resources HW acceleration for data analytics Seamless programming model Scalable

+ computation = awesome Call to Arms! If this all sounds interesting, please join the SNIA Computational Storage TWG. End-users and software people are needed! If you have thoughts on how you would consume NVMe™ Computation, please let us know As SNIA starts interfacing with NVMe please participate in the TPAR/TP discussions! + computation = awesome

Questions?