Not your Grandpa's SSD: The Era of Co-Designed Storage Devices

Abstract

Gone is the time when a Solid-State Drive (SSD) was just a fast drop-in replacement for a Hard-Disk Drive (HDD). Thanks to the NVMe ecosystem, nowadays, SSDs are accessed through specific interfaces and modern I/O frameworks. SSDs have also grown versatile with time and can now support various use cases ranging from cold, high-density storage to hot, low-latency ones. The body of knowledge about building such different devices is mostly available, but it is less than accessible to non-experts. Finding which device variation can better support a given workload also requires deep domain knowledge. This tutorial's first goal is to make these tasks--understanding the design of SSDs and pairing them with the data-intensive workloads they support well--more inviting. The tutorial goes further, however, in that it suggests that a new kind of SSD plays an essential role in post-Moore computer systems. These devices can be co-designed to align their capabilities to an application's requirements. A salient feature of these devices is that they can run application logic besides just storing data. They can thus gracefully scale processing capabilities with the volume of data stored. The tutorial's second goal is thus to establish the design space for co-designed SSDs and show the tools available to hardware, systems, and databases researchers that wish to explore this space.