A Hardware Filesystem Implementation with Multidisk Support

Abstract

Modern High-End Computing systems frequently include FPGAs as compute accelerators. These programmable logic devices now support disk controller IP cores which offer the ability to introduce new, innovative functionalities that, previously, were not practical. This article describes one such innovation: a filesystem implemented in hardware. This has the potential of improving the performance of data-intensive applications by connecting secondary storage directly to FPGA compute accelerators. To test the feasibility of this idea, a Hardware Filesystem was designed with four basic operations (open, read, write, and delete). Furthermore, multi-disk and RAID-0 (striping) support has been implemented as an option in the filesystem. A RAM Disk core was created to emulate a SATA disk drive so results on running FPGA systems could be readily measured. By varying the block size from 64 to 4096 bytes, it was found that 1024 bytes gave the best performance while using a very modest 7% of a Xilinx XC4VFX60's slices and only four (of the 232) BRAM blocks available.

NanoFS: a hardware‐oriented file system

“…The impact on the bigger chip is negligible (1.1–1.4%). In comparison, the hardware‐implemented functions of the general purpose UNIX‐like file system in [7] use 1335 slices (5.3%) and 3 BRAMS (512 B block size) in an XC4VFX60 device.…”

“…On the other hand, some initiatives have made progress in implementing file system operations in hardware using field programmable gate array (FPGA) technology like in [7], where the core functionality of a UNIX‐like file system is implemented in hardware, although this development is not specifically targeted to embedded systems but to accelerate file operations in high performance computing systems.…”

Architecture and Applications for an All-FPGA Parallel Computer

“…Hardware File System: The hardware file system is based on the UNIX filesystem but has several distinctions as explained in [14]. This HWFS implements Open, Read, Write and Delete file functions.…”