Tuple spaces in hardware for accelerated implicit routing

Abstract

Organizing and optimizing data objects on networks with support for data migration and failing nodes is a complicated problem to handle as systems grow. The goal of this work is to demonstrate that high levels of speedup can be achieved by moving responsibility for finding, fetching, and staging data into an FPGA-based network card. We present a system for implicit routing of data via FPGA-based network cards. In this system, data structures are requested by name, and the network of FPGAs finds the data within the network and relays the structure to the requester. This is acheived through successive examination of hardware hash tables implemented in the FPGA. By avoiding software stacks between nodes, the data is quickly fetched entirely through FPGA-FPGA interaction. The performance of this system is orders of magnitude faster than software implementations due to the improved speed of the hash tables and lowered latency between the network nodes.