An Offloading Architecture of Lossless Compression Based on Smart NIC

Abstract

With the explosive growth of information, data transmission and compression are becoming more and more important. Most of the existing compression algorithms are implemented by software architecture, which results in the waste of CPU resources. By unloading the algorithm to hardware, it is beneficial to reasonably allocate resources and improve the processing efficiency of CPU. The smart Network Interface Cards (NIC) based on FPGA can not only complete the task of data unloading, but also have the function of sending the compressed data to the cloud storage device directly. It provides a new operating environment for the compression algorithm with efficient network transmission speed, and is able to reduce the system power consumption within a certain range.In this paper, we design an FPGA-based smart NIC that has the ability to unload CPU’s LZ4 compression algorithm to FPGA to improve the utilization rate of CPU. Experiments show that the architecture is able to successfully open up the data path, and the network speed is nearly 46 Gb/s. At the same time, it can be seen from the experiments that the time required to run the LZ4 compression algorithm on the CPU is proportional to the size of files. It shows that for large files, using a smart NIC for data offloading has strong practical significance.