An operating system for a Reconfigurable Active SSD processing node

Abstract

We have recently proposed a Distributed Reconfigurable Active SSD computation platform (RASSD) for processing data-intensive applications at the storage node itself, without having to move data over slow networks. In this paper, we present the design of an operating system (OS) for the RASSD node. RASSD OS is a multitasking real-time operating system that runs on the 32-bit MicroBlaze <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">®</sup> soft processor core available for Xilinx <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">®</sup> FPGA's. We discuss in this paper our OS design features which include initializing the node and configuring the different components of the RASSD node, monitoring the node's activities, and processing middleware requests. RASSD OS provides a set of services to the middleware through which it hides the low-level details of the node's hardware architecture. We describe the functions essential for the data-intensive processing within the RASSD node using examples that capture the common states of the node and various possible requests.