MaxLinear, Inc., a leading provider of high-performance storage accelerator SoCs, and Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) announced a collaboration to enable hardware-accelerated OpenZFS File System storage for large scale, high-performance computing (HPC) environments.
Los Alamos National Laboratory and MaxLinear have jointly developed a hardware-accelerated OpenZFS storage architecture designed to improve performance and storage capacity for next-generation NVMe flash-based storage infrastructure.
“Los Alamos’ Direct I/O support and Z.I.A. (ZFS Interface for Accelerators) work were developed to accelerate performance for the ZFS-using community,” said Gary Grider, Senior Director for Computing Technologies at the Laboratory. “In this collaboration, MaxLinear demonstrated hardware-offloaded ZFS operations with reported speedups of approximately 39x for writes and 7x for reads. These results illustrate the potential for accelerator-based approaches to reduce host CPU involvement while maintaining the data-protection benefits associated with ZFS.”
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“Los Alamos National Laboratory has been at the forefront of advancing storage architectures for high-performance computing,” said Vikas Choudhary, Executive Vice President of Connectivity & Storage at MaxLinear. “By enabling hardware-accelerated ZFS with Panther™ Storage Accelerators, we deliver deep data compression, data protection services, and multi-hundred gigabit scalability-while preserving the data integrity guarantees that ZFS is known for.”
LANL has decades of experience in operating ZFS at scale and has led to the development of key filesystem extensions, including Direct I/O support and ZIA (ZFS Interface for Accelerators)—a structured framework for introducing hardware acceleration into the ZFS data path without modifying core filesystem semantics.
MaxLinear contributes the Panther™ family of Storage Accelerator SoCs and Storage Software Development Kits, providing high throughput, low latency execution of ZFS data path services using a domain-specific high-performance SoC architecture. Panther™ provides deep data compression, encryption, deduplication, and data protection services executed inline in hardware, delivering high throughput and low latency while significantly reducing host CPU overhead.
Through this collaboration, Panther is integrated with ZFS as a Data Processing Unit Services Module (DPUSM) provider, enabling inline hardware acceleration of selected CPU‑intensive operations such as data compression and checksum generation to increase storage capacity, improve file I/O performance, and reduce host CPU utilization. This combined hardware‑software approach preserves ZFS ordering, consistency, and data integrity guarantees while enabling efficient compute offload and scalable acceleration.
SOURCE: MaxLinear
