Hardware Accelerated ZFS Using Computational Storage - SDC 2022

Discover how to accelerate ZFS operations using computational storage devices in this technical conference talk from the Storage Developer Conference 2022. Learn about Los Alamos National Laboratory's innovative approach to integrating Data Processing Units (DPUs) into storage systems through the DPU Services Module (DPU-SVC) and ZFS Interface for Accelerators (Z.I.A.). Explore how these implementations achieve 10-30x performance improvements by offloading CPU and memory-intensive operations like compression, checksumming, and erasure coding to hardware accelerators. Gain detailed insights into the technical architecture, implementation challenges, and performance results using real scientific datasets. Understand the standardized interfaces developed for DPU integration and how they enable transparent acceleration without requiring application modifications. While some background knowledge in computational storage, ZFS, and kernel modules is helpful, the presentation covers key concepts of hardware-accelerated storage systems and demonstrates practical performance gains through hardware offloading techniques.