Energy Efficient and Low-Cost Server Architecture for Hadoop Storage Appliance

Abstract

This paper proposes the Lempel-Ziv 4(LZ4) compression accelerator optimized for scale-out servers in data centers. In order to reduce CPU loads caused by compression, we propose an accelerator solution and implement the accelerator on an Field Programmable Gate Array(FPGA) as heterogeneous computing. The LZ4 compression hardware accelerator is a fully pipelined architecture and applies 16 dictionaries to enhance the parallelism for high throughput compressor. Our hardware accelerator is based on the 20-stage pipeline and dictionary architecture, highly customized to LZ4 compression algorithm and parallel hardware implementation. Proposing dictionary architecture allows achieving high throughput by comparing input sequences in multiple dictionaries simultaneously compared to a single dictionary. The experimental results provide the high throughput with intensively optimized in the FPGA. Additionally, we compare our implementation to CPU implementation results of LZ4 to provide insights on FPGA-based data centers. The proposed accelerator achieves the compression throughput of 639MB/s with fine parallelism to be deployed into scale-out servers. This approach enables the low power Intel Atom processor to realize the Hadoop storage along with the compression accelerator.