NICFS: a file system based on persistent memory and SmartNIC

Abstract

Emergence of new hardware, including persistent memory and smart network interface card (SmartNIC), has brought new opportunities to file system design. In this paper, we design and implement a new file system named NICFS based on persistent memory and SmartNIC. We divide the file system into two parts: the front end and the back end. In the front end, data writes are appended to the persistent memory in a log-structured way, leveraging the fast persistence advantage of persistent memory. In the back end, the data in logs are fetched, processed, and patched to files in the background, leveraging the processing capacity of SmartNIC. Evaluation results show that NICFS outperforms Ext4 by about 21%/10% and about 19%/50% on large and small reads/writes, respectively.

Keywords

Non-volatile memory / Persistent memory / Data processing unit / Smart network interface card (SmartNIC) / File system

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

2023 Zhejiang University Press