FlashAbacus: A Self-Governing Flash-Based Accelerator for Low-Power Systems

TL;DR

FlashAbacus is a novel self-governing flash-based accelerator that enhances energy efficiency and processing bandwidth for heterogeneous computing systems by enabling direct multi-kernel data access without host intervention.

Contribution

It introduces a self-governing accelerator integrating flash modules with lightweight multiprocessors, allowing direct multi-kernel processing and data access without host-level file systems.

Findings

127% increase in data processing bandwidth

78.4% reduction in energy consumption

Effective handling of diverse application kernels

Abstract

Energy efficiency and computing flexibility are some of the primary design constraints of heterogeneous computing. In this paper, we present FlashAbacus, a data-processing accelerator that self-governs heterogeneous kernel executions and data storage accesses by integrating many flash modules in lightweight multiprocessors. The proposed accelerator can simultaneously process data from different applications with diverse types of operational functions, and it allows multiple kernels to directly access flash without the assistance of a host-level file system or an I/O runtime library. We prototype FlashAbacus on a multicore-based PCIe platform that connects to FPGA-based flash controllers with a 20 nm node process. The evaluation results show that FlashAbacus can improve the bandwidth of data processing by 127%, while reducing energy consumption by 78.4%, as compared to a conventional method of heterogeneous computing. \blfootnote{This paper is accepted by and will be published at 2018 EuroSys. This document is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work.