Recently proposed key-value SSD (KVSSD) provides the popular and versatile key-value interface at the device level, promising high performance and simplified storage management with the minimal involvement of the host software. However, its I/O command set over NVMe is defined on a per key-value pair basis, enforcing the host to post key-value operations to KVSSD independently. This not only incurs high interfacing overhead for small key-value operations but also makes it subtle to support transactions in KVSSDs without a software support. In this paper, we propose compound commands for KVSSDs. The compound command allows the host to specify multiple key-value pairs in a single NVMe operation, thereby effectively amortizing I/O interfacing overhead. In addition, it provides an effective way for defining a transaction comprised of multiple key-value pairs. Our evaluation using a prototype KVSSD and an in-house KVSSD emulator shows promising benefits of the compound command, with improving the performance by up to 55%.
This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea(NRF) grants funded by the Korea government(MSIT) (No. 2016R1A2A1A05005494 and No. 2018R1C1B5085902). Also, the ICT at Seoul National University provides research facilities for this study.
