ASIC-based Compression Accelerators for Storage Systems: Design, Placement, and Profiling Insights

Abstract: Lossless compression imposes significant computational over head on datacenters when performed on CPUs. Hardware compression and decompression processing units (CDPUs) can alleviate this overhead, but optimal algorithm selection, microarchitectural design, and system-level placement of CDPUs are still not well understood. We present the design of an ASIC-based in-storage CDPU and provide a comprehensive end-to-end evaluation against two leading ASIC accelerators, Intel QAT 8970 and QAT 4xxx. The evaluation spans three dominant CDPU placement regimes: peripheral, on-chip, and in-storage. Our results reveal: (i) acute sensitivity of throughput and latency to CDPU placement and interconnection, (ii) strong correlation between compression efficiency and data patterns/layouts, (iii) placement-driven divergences between microbenchmark gains and real-application speedups, (iv) discrepancies between module and system-level power efficiency, and (v) scalability and multi-tenant interference is sues of various CDPUs. These findings motivate a placement-aware, cross-layer rethinking of hardware (de)compression for hyperscale storage infrastructures.