2.2DCApr 15
OffloadFS: Leveraging Disaggregated Storage for Computation OffloadingSungho Moon, Daegyu Han, Hera Koo et al.
Disaggregated storage systems improve resource utilization and enable independent scaling of storage and compute resources by separating storage resources from computing resources in data centers. NVMe over fabrics (NVMeoF) is a key technology that underpins the functionality and benefits of disaggregated storage systems. While NVMeoF inherently possesses substantial computing and memory capacity, these resources are often underutilized for tasks beyond simple I/O delegation. This study proposes OffloadFS, a user-level file system that enables offloaded IO-intensive tasks primarily to a disaggregated storage node for near-data processing, with the option to offload to peer compute nodes as well, without the need for distributed lock management. OffloadFS optimizes cache management by reducing interference between threads performing distinct I/O operations. On top of OffloadFS, we develop OffloadDB, which enables RocksDB to offload MemTable flush and compaction operations, and OffloadPrep, which offloads image pre-processing tasks for machine learning to disaggregated storage nodes. Our evaluation shows that OffloadFS improves the performance of RocksDB and machine learning pre-processing tasks by up to 3.36x and 1.85x, respectively, compared to OCFS2.
DCSep 30, 2025
Accelerating LLM Inference with Precomputed Query StorageJay H. Park, Youngju Cho, Choungsol Lee et al.
Large language model (LLM) inference often suffers from high latency, particularly in resource-constrained environments such as on-device or edge deployments. To address this challenge, we present StorInfer, a novel storage-assisted LLM inference system that accelerates response time by precomputing and storing predictable query-response pairs offline. When a user query semantically matches a precomputed query, StorInfer bypasses expensive GPU inference and instantly returns the stored response, significantly reducing latency and compute costs. To maximize coverage and effectiveness, StorInfer employs an LLM-driven generator that adaptively produces diverse and deduplicated queries based on a given knowledge base. This is achieved via two techniques: adaptive query masking, which prevents regeneration of similar queries, and adaptive sampling, which dynamically tunes generation parameters to promote semantic diversity. The resulting query-response pairs are embedded and indexed using a disk-backed vector database to enable fast, similarity-based retrieval at runtime. Using this approach, we generated 150K unique precomputed pairs (taking up to 830 MB of storage space), achieving up to 17.3% latency reduction with no loss in response quality. Our evaluation across multiple QA datasets demonstrates the practicality and scalability of storage-assisted inference, especially in scenarios with predictable query distributions. StorInfer highlights a promising direction in leveraging storage as a primary enabler for efficient, low-latency LLM deployment.