Accelerating RocksDB with Eideticom’s NoLoad® NVMe-based Computational Storage Processor

RocksDB, a high performance key-value database developed by Facebook, has proven effective in using the high data speeds made possible by Solid State Drives (SSDs). By leveraging the NVMe standard, Eideticom’s NoLoad® presents FPGA computational storage processors as NVMe namespaces to the operating system and enables efficient data transfer between the NoLoad® Computational Storage Processors (CSPs), host memory and other NVMe/PCIe devices in the system. Presenting Computational Storage Processors as NVMe namespaces has the significant benefit of minimal software effort to integrate computational resources. In this paper we use Eideticom’s NoLoad® to speed up RocksDB. Compared to software compaction running on a Dell R7425 PowerEdge server, our NoLoad®, running on Xilinx’s Avleo U280, resulted in 6x improvement in database transactions and 2.5x reduction is CPU usage while reducing worst case latency by 2.7x.