FPGA Neural Networks
Article FPGA Neural Networks The inference of neural networks on FPGA devices Introduction The ever-increasing connectivity in the world is generating ever-increasing levels of data.
NoLoad® Transparent Compression
Plug-and-Play Hardware Compression
Available as Plug-and-Play Add-In Card or U.2 Module
Compression That's Simple to Add to Your Application with No Software Changes
40× Faster
Write to storage 40× faster while keeping the same compression ratio as software
Low CPU Usage
By accelerating in hardware, CPU usage is cut by 1/5th
Easy + Simple
Plug-in a Card or Module and Instantly Your Application is Using Hardware Compressed Storage
The Smart Way to Reduce Storage Costs
What is NoLoad®?
NoLoad is a Computational Storage Processor (CSP) with Computational Storage Services (CSS) such as Transparent Compression
Created by Eideticom, and running on BittWare hardware, NoLoad CSPs are a combination of IP and hardware centered around accelerating storage. NoLoad is designed for several core features:
- CPU offload (the “NoLoad” comes in here)
- Software-defined hardware; users get a bitstream and don’t need to do complex FPGA programming
- High-performance Computational Storage Services (CSS) like compression, analytics, or deduplication handle compute-intensive data manipulation tasks on data flowing through or data at rest.
- Easy end-user application integration with a Linux filesystem change (NoLoad stacked file system) that lets the application get NoLoad acceleration with no application code changes. Alternatively, a user-space library also available for users wanting no OS changes.
You can think of NoLoad as a framework that orchestrates a number of acceleration features like compression. Some use cases will utilize multiple acceleration features together. Because it’s software-defined hardware, building optimized systems doesn’t require an FPGA engineering team.
Adding a NoLoad CSP to existing storage systems is easy with a range of form factors including low-profile PCIe add-in-cards and U.2 modules. One or two of these then accelerate arrays of flash memory drives. All data movement is over native NVMe with high-performance peer-to-peer transfers.
What is Transparent Compression?
Transparent Compression is a Computational Storage Service (CSS) for NoLoad CSPs
Running on a range of modules and add-in-cards, the Transparent Compression IP is a CSS component of the NoLoad CSP. It provides compression services for the host application. When the hardware is implemented using the NoLoad filesystem (NoLoad FS), the user’s application doesn’t need to be modified to take advantage of the hardware compression offload.
Performance Comparison
NoLoad Transparent Compression is compared to software (CPU-based) compression and no compression.
Throughput (MB/s)
Compression Ratio
The dataset used was Big Data (TeraGen), and the server utilized two IA-220-U2 acceleration modules. Compression was LZ4.
Benchmark results for Eideticom NoLoad solution on 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors and Altera Agilex 7 FPGA accelerator cards. Data sourced from Eideticom.
Takeaway
99% reduction in CPU cores used
36% reduction in total power
Demo Video
Watch Transparent Compression in Action!
Example: Reducing Storage Costs
How does NoLoad Transparent Compression reduce storage costs at a system level? We compare a system of 192TB SSDs with software compression versus adding two NoLoad Transparent Compression modules.
Without Transparent Compression
With NoLoad Transparent Compression
2× Dual-CPU Servers
Software Compression (4× CPUs required to handle load)
- 10.7 GB/s Compression Throughput
- 278TB Effective (192TB SSDs)
1× Single CPU Server
With 2× NoLoad Modules
- 23 GB/s Compression Throughput
- 400TB Effective (192TB SSDs)
90% Lower Total Cost
2× Throughput Per Server
60% Lower Power
Deployment Hardware
NoLoad runs on a range of FPGA-based accelerators from BittWare:
Sales Part Numbers
These part numbers order the configuration with NoLoad® pre-installed.
| Part Number | Description |
|---|---|
| IA-440i-0017 | Low-profile PCIe card |
| IA-220-U2-0002 | U.2 module |
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