FSSD: FPGA-Based Emulator for SSDs

Solid State Drives (SSDs) have become increasingly popular due to their superior access latency and bandwidth compared to Hard Disk Drives (HDDs). However, to fully understand the impact of SSD design and microarchitecture on end-to-end application performance, researchers need to move beyond treating SSDs as black-box components. Unfortunately, purchasing multiple SSDs for research is expensive and ineffective since the underlying microarchitecture is still unknown to the system designer. While simulators have become the most popular method for studying SSDs, existing software-based simulators lack real data transfers and cannot simulate the latency from NVMe and PCIe interfaces. Additionally, simulating the entire SSD using software codes is time-consuming and limits the number of experiments that can be run in a reasonable amount of time. To address these issues, we present FSSD, an FPGA-based emulation system that models the latency and access patterns of an actual NVMe SSD. FSSD takes advantage of the flexibility of an FPGA, enabling users to customize SSD microarchitecture features and explore the design space for data-intensive applications. FSSD can be interacting with real operating systems, instead of relying on Virtual Machines like most other software simulators do. Evaluations show that FSSD provides over 1000x speedup compared to software-based simulation using the SimpleSSD simulator. The ability to customize SSD parameters and emulate NAND latency with high precision makes FSSD a valuable platform for SSD research and development. FSSD is also open-sourced to benefit the research community.