Reconfigurable active drive: an FPGA accelerated storage architecture for data-intensize applications

Abstract — This paper presents an FPGA-based Solid State Drive (SSD) architecture for data-intensive applications called Reconfigurable Active Drive (RAD). In the RAD architecture, an FPGA utilizes parallel data transfer of flash memory to improve the data throughput for streaming applications. The storage architecture is designed to match the I/O bandwidth of the FPGA and is capable of fully parallelizing data access and data processing. RAD is modelled and evaluated using an SSD simulator with applications implemented on FPGAs. Compared with reconfigurable computing (RC) and pure software (SW) approaches, RAD achieves up to 159 × and 541 × speedups respectively in terms of the end-to-end throughput. I