Network-on-SSD: A Scalable and High-Performance Communication Design Paradigm for SSDs

In recent years, flash memory solid state disks (SSDs) have shown a great potential to change storage infrastructure because of its advantages of high speed and high throughput random access. This promising storage, however, greatly suffers from performance loss because of frequent ``erase-before-write´´ and ``garbage collection´´ operations. Thus, novel circuit-level, architectural, and algorithmic techniques are currently explored to address these limitations. In parallel with others, current study investigates replacing shared buses in multi-channel architecture of SSDs with an interconnection network to achieve scalable, high throughput, and reliable SSD storage systems. Roughly speaking, such a communication scheme provides superior parallelism that allows us to compensate the main part of the performance loss related to the aforementioned limitations through increasing data storage and retrieval processing throughput.