De-layered grid storage server

Abstract

Networks have become faster and disks have become fatter at a pace that, despite Moore's law, CPU developments have simply not been been able to keep up with. We present a Grid Storage Server which is capable of scaling up to meet the "terabit-terabyte" demands of very large scale grid computation applications with large data sets.The Grid Storage Server is implemented almost completely in silicon, whether FPGA or ASIC; the fast-path of this server does not use a CPU or von Neumann style (instruction/data) machine. Instead, multiple layers of a protocol stack are compiled into a hardware engine that processes all layers concurrently on-chip. This "serverless" design allows it to scale up to match "terabit" network speeds and "terabyte" disk capacities enabling large scale grid applications.At a price-point a small percent of that of a server-based design, the Grid Server incorporates a standards compliant high-performance TCP stack that can saturate 40Gbps using a single or multiple TCP connections. The current design directly attaches to a storage array of 48TB capacity. The storage array is organized with a fault-tolerant RAID for performance and reliability; the RAID configuration is adaptive and can be tuned to conflicting application needs. As a bonus, because the control-plane in the silicon-based TCP engine has very low jitter, the protocol engine has mechanisms for nanosecond precision clock synchronisation across very large distances, thus, for the first time, enabling transcontinental real-time and temporal grid computation and database applications.