Eideticom announces the production release of its NoLoad® Transparent Compression solution on BittWare’s IA-440i Agilex-7 FPGA Add-in Card

We are excited to announce the production release of Eideticom’s Transparent Compression solution on our partner BittWare’s IA-440i Add-in Card with Intel Agilex-7 FPGA. In this blog we will be providing a summary of features/performance and why it’s important.  As a quick background, Eideticom offers market-leading storage acceleration services for compression, encryption and data analytics. At Eideticom we have worked to address the computational storage market through our NoLoad solution which offers a promising avenue for customers to offload their CPUs for essential business functionality.

While most sectors experience frequent change, the storage industry is rapidly evolving and enhanced capabilities for data management and protection are becoming increasingly necessary in today’s market. Processing features including compression and encryption are becoming fundamental to bolster storage capacity. With such intensive processes it is crucial to offload the CPU and reduce compute cycle consumption. NoLoad provides lookaside acceleration services, such as compression, for the server allowing you to use your existing SSDs and flash vendor of choice. Since NoLoad is NVMe you can also use NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) to provide disaggregated acceleration. NoLoad solutions can also scale linearly by adding more devices to your server. 

As the need for computational storage grows, the efficient implementation of computational storage functions (CSFs) also grows. At Eideticom, our computational storage devices achieve this by coupling the CSF onto an FPGA-based NVMe controller. Our solutions ensure that storage functions are tightly integrated with the storage devices themselves, lessening the need for data movement and streamlining processor activities. This approach not only accelerates functions for data analytics, storage, and AI but also paves the way for new applications like data transcoding, essential for modern databases.  

Unleashing Processor Performance

At the heart of our innovation is the NoLoad solution. NoLoad is an NVMe computational storage processor that exceeds the limitations of traditional FPGA-based acceleration interfaces. NoLoad embodies versatility and is engineered to enhance data-intensive operations through a suite of functions that include compression, encryption, and data analytics. To service these functions across a wide range of environments, our NoLoad solution is supported across a variety form factors, including BittWare’s IA-440i PCIe Gen5 card (hyperlink: https://www.bittware.com/products/ia-440i/ ). BittWare’s IA-440i enables NoLoad to handle multiple functions, such as compression/decompression, encryption, and data analytics. This capability allows CPU cores to simultaneously perform other essential functions. In addition to our transparent compression filesystem, NLFS, the NoLoad software stack supports plugins for Hadoop, ZFS, kdb+ and CEPH and interoperates with software compression solutions such as gzip.

A Benchmark for Success

We put NoLoad’s capabilities to the test in a benchmark that illustrated a significant reduction in CPU core usage and power consumption when offloading tasks on our solution on BittWare’s Agilex-7 based IA-440i add-in card. The benchmarks consist of two scenarios performing simultaneous writing compressed medical data to an SSD array while reading and decompressing the data from the SSD array.

The first scenario, as shown in the figure below, utilizes one 4th Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processor, running with a 2 GHz clock with a total of 112 available cores. The compression and decompression algorithms are executing in software on the CPU cores.

The second scenario, as shown below, differs in the inclusion of our NoLoad solution to handle compression and decompression implemented on one BittWare IA-440i add-in card. 

As shown in the figure below, the results are compelling. Despite both scenarios resulting in a nearly identical throughput performance the FPGA-based solution vastly reduces the number of CPU cores utilized from 112 to 1.4 cores and a reduction in power usage from 878W to 560W. Respectively that shows a 99% decrease for CPU core utilization and a 36% reduction in power use. Our solution frees up valuable resources for other revenue-generating tasks without sacrificing performance.

 Benchmark results for Eideticom NoLoad solution on BittWare’s 440i Agilex 7 FPGA Accelerator card. Data sourced from Eideticom compared to a single-socket 4th Generation Xeon CPU.

This is one scenario demonstrating the value our NoLoad Transparent Compression solution brings for a balanced read/write workload on the BittWare IA-440i. Compression and decompression performance can be adjusted to support your server needs using NVMe firmware update. For a write heavy workload, the BittWare-IA440i can achieve 18GB/s of input traffic and for a read heavy workload it can achieve 28GB/s of output traffic. 

Conclusion

Our introduction of Transparent Compression on BittWare’s IA-440i Agilex-7 FPGA Add-in Card marks a notable step in the field of computational storage. The NoLoad solution effectively reduces CPU workload and energy consumption while maintaining or improving performance levels. This enables businesses to allocate their computational resources more efficiently towards growth and innovation.