LEED: A Low-Power, Fast Persistent Key-Value Store on SmartNIC JBOFs

The recent emergence of low-power high-throughput programmable storage platforms-SmartNIC JBOF (just-a-bunch-of-flash)-motivates us to rethink the cluster architecture and system stack for energyefficient large-scale data-intensive workloads. Unlike conventional systems that use an array of server JBOFs or embedded storage nodes, the introduction of SmartNIC JBOFs has drastically changed the cluster compute, memory, and I/O configurations. Such an extremely imbalanced architecture makes prior system design philosophies and techniques either ineffective or invalid.

This paper presents LEED, a distributed, replicated, and persistent key-value store over an array of SmartNIC JBOFs. Our key ideas to tackle the unique challenges induced by a SmartNIC JBOF are: trading excessive I/O bandwidth for scarce SmartNIC core computing cycles and memory capacity; making scheduling decisions as early as possible to streamline the request execution flow. LEED systematically revamps the software stack and proposes techniques across per-SSD, intra-JBOF, and inter-JBOF levels. Our prototyped system based on Broadcom Stingray outperforms existing solutions that use beefy server JBOFs and wimpy embedded storage nodes by 4.2×/3.8× and 17.5×/19.1× in terms of requests per Joule for 256B/1KB key-value objects.