An FPGA memcached appliance

Providing low-latency access to large amounts of data is one of the foremost requirements for many web services. To address these needs, systems such as Memcached have been created which provide a distributed, all in-memory key-value store. These systems are critical and often deployed across hundreds or thousands of servers. However, these systems are not well matched for commodity servers, as they require significant CPU resources to achieve reasonable network bandwidth, yet the core Memcached functions do not benefit from the high performance of standard server CPUs. In this paper, we demonstrate the design of an FPGA-based Memcached appliance. We take Memcached, a complex software system, and implement its core functionality on an FPGA. By leveraging the FPGA's design and utilizing its customizable logic to create a specialized appliance we are able to tightly integrate networking, compute, and memory. This integration allows us to overcome many of the bottlenecks found in standard servers. Our design provides performance on-par with baseline servers, but consumes only 9% of the power of the baseline. Scaled out, we see benefits at the data center level, substantially improving the performance-per-dollar while improving energy efficiency by 3.2X to 10.9X.