This proposed talk will present how Postgres could seamlessly and significantly benefit from replacing normal solid-state drives (SSDs) with emerging computational storage drives (CSDs). Aligned with the grand trends towards heterogeneous and near-data computing, computational storage has gained tremendous momentum and led to an on-going industry-wide effort on expanding the NVMe standard to support CSD. The first generation CSD products have built-in transparent compression, which can be deployed into existing computing infrastructure without any changes to the OS and applications. This proposed talk will discuss and present: (1) brief introduction to commercially available CSDs with built-in transparent compression, (2) experimental results that show, by replacing leading-edge normal SSD with CSD, one could reduce the storage cost by over 50% and meanwhile achieve 30% better Postgres TPS performance, and (3) experimental results that show CSD could meanwhile significantly reduce the Postgres write amplification, which enables the use of emerging low-cost QLC flash memory to further reduce the system storage cost. Finally, this proposed talk will discuss the potential of leveraging CSDs to improve the efficiency of important operations in Postgres.
Speakers: Tong Zhang