The widespread deployment of storage disaggregation in the cloud has facilitated flexible scaling and storage overprovisioning, allowing for high utilization of storage capacity and IOPS. Instead of utilizing remote storage protocols to access remote disks, a middle-tier is introduced between compute servers and storage servers in order to serve I/O requests from compute servers and provide computations such as compression and decompression. However, due to the need for a cloud to concurrently serve millions of VMs that require access to disaggregated storage, the middle-tier requires a massive number of servers to process network traffic between computing and storage nodes. For example, a major cloud company may deploy hundreds of thousands of high-end servers to provide such a service for its cloud storage, because the existing CPU-based middle-tier suffers from a severe issue of compute-intensive compression/decompression on high-throughput storage traffic. To address this issue, we introduce SmartDS, a middle-tier-centric SmartNIC that serves storage I/O requests with low latency and high throughput, while maintaining high flexibility and programmability. The key idea behind SmartDS is the application-aware message split (AAMS) mechanism, which allows for the processing of the message's header on the host CPU to achieve high flexibility, and the message's payload on the SmartDS. Experimental results demonstrate that SmartDS provides up to 4.3× more throughput than a CPU-based middle-tier and enables the linear scale-up of multiple network ports and multiple SmartNICs, thus significantly reducing cloud infrastructure costs for disaggregated block storage.

SoC design trends show increasing integration of special-purpose, third-party hardware blocks to accelerate diverse types of computation. These accelerator blocks interact with each other in unexpected ways when integrated into a complex, accelerator-rich SoC. In this work we propose a novel solution that guides verification engineers to the high-priority accelerator interaction scenarios during RTL verification. We observe that interaction scenarios frequently exercised by software for the SoC, which is typically developed alongside the RTL, should be the highest priority targets for verification. To this end we analyze the behavior of software executed on high-level simulation models to identify commonly occurring accelerator interaction scenarios. We encapsulate scenarios observed from diverse software executions into an abstract representation that can then be used to extract coverage models and generate test programs. Our experiments show that our solution is able to identify frequently exercised scenarios, extract coverage models, and generate compact, high-quality tests for two completely different SoC designs.

Based on the Moderate-Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) sea surface temperature (SST) of ten years (2000-2009) and Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-view Sensor (SeaWiFS) ocean color data of 13 years (1998-2010), the Kuroshio oceanic front exists between two entirely different water masses in the East China Sea, namely, the Kuroshio and continental shelf waters. The Kuroshio thermal front (derived from the SST data) disappears in summer due to the spatially uniform surface heating, whereas the Kuroshio ocean color front in summer is distinct and exhibits the same spatial pattern along the shelf break of the deep Okinawa Trough as in winter. The Kuroshio thermal front has one bifurcation at about (126° E, 28° N) and extends northward toward the Cheju Island lasting from December to March, but this kind of branch is absent in the ocean color data.