We are very happy to announce that our LineFS paper was among the three papers that won the Best Paper Award at SOSP 2021!
LineFS builds upon our previous work on Assise [OSDI ’20] by offloading CPU-intensive tasks to a SmartNIC (BlueField-1 in our case) for about 80% performance improvement across the board.
Jongyul’s presentation is already available:
This is joint work with
Jongyul Kim (KAIST), Insu Jang (University of Michigan), Waleed Reda (KTH Royal Institute of Technology / Université catholique de Louvain), Jaeseong Im (KAIST), Marco Canini (KAUST), Dejan Kostić (KTH Royal Institute of Technology), Youngjin Kwon (KAIST), Simon Peter (The University of Texas at Austin), and Emmett Witchel (The University of Texas at Austin / Katana Graph).
Full abstract is as follows:
In multi-tenant systems, the CPU overhead of distributed file systems (DFSes) is increasingly a burden to application performance. CPU and memory interference cause degraded and unstable application and storage performance, in particular for operation latency. Recent client-local DFSes for persistent memory (PM) accelerate this trend. DFS offload to SmartNICs is a promising solution to these problems, but it is challenging to fit the complex demands of a DFS onto simple SmartNIC processors located across PCIe.
We present LineFS, a SmartNIC-offloaded, high-performance DFS with support for client-local PM. To fully leverage the SmartNIC architecture, we decompose DFS operations into execution stages that can be offloaded to a parallel data-path execution pipeline on the SmartNIC. LineFS offloads CPU-intensive DFS tasks, like replication, compression, data publication, index and consistency management to a SmartNIC.
We implement LineFS on the Mellanox BlueField SmartNIC and compare it to Assise, a state-of-the-art PM DFS. LineFS improves latency in LevelDB up to 80% and throughput in Filebench up to 79%, while providing extended DFS availability during host system failures.
