A Hardware Filesystem Implementation with Multidisk Support

Modern High-End Computing systems frequently include FPGAs as compute accelerators. These programmable logic devices now support disk controller IP cores which offer the ability to introduce new, innovative functionalities that, previously, were not practical. This article describes one such innovation: a filesystem implemented in hardware. This has the potential of improving the performance of data-intensive applications by connecting secondary storage directly to FPGA compute accelerators. To test the feasibility of this idea, a Hardware Filesystem was designed with four basic operations (open, read, write, and delete). Furthermore, multi-disk and RAID-0 (striping) support has been implemented as an option in the filesystem. A RAM Disk core was created to emulate a SATA disk drive so results on running FPGA systems could be readily measured. By varying the block size from 64 to 4096 bytes, it was found that 1024 bytes gave the best performance while using a very modest 7% of a Xilinx XC4VFX60's slices and only four (of the 232) BRAM blocks available.