PANDAS

Even today, transporting data between mass storage and servers is proving more problematic for many big data / cloud applications bottleneck. In PANDAS, both the computing power and the energy efficiency of these demanding applications should be realized through the implementation a novel intelligent mass storage and the development optimized on it software be increased. The technological core is to designed and manufacture a cascadable PCI Express expansion card, having a variety of parallel flash memory banks as mass storage which in turn very quickly adapts to a modern reconfigurable Multi-processor system-on-chip (MPSoC). By the Use of Programmable Logic (FPGA) on the MPSoC High throughput, low latency data processing operations are achieved directly within the mass storage devices (so-called Near-Data Processing, NDP ). The PANDAS card, whose architecture is a unique feature can then be flexible to expand commercial server in Data centers are used. Since the PANDAS platform can be used for a wide variety of applications should, a number of software components will be developed. In particular middleware and Programming tool flows, with which new NDP applications can be created by developers without in-depth Knowledge of the hardware design. As reference application for big data / cloud scenarios becomes the widespread Key value store RocksDB created in a PANDAS-accelerated version and integrated into the data center infrastructure via Docker / VM as an appliance. The partners organized in the PANDAS consortium contribute to the achievement of the Project objectives achieve optimal competencies: the underlying technologies come from current academic research in the field of embedded Systems and their applications of the TU Darmstadt (FPGA-based Hardware accelerator for near-data processing) and data management at the Reutlingen University (new database architectures for the exploitation of persistent semiconductor memories). PRO DESIGN Electronic GmbH leads the actual design and manufacture of the PCI Express card through, while Xelera Technologies GmbH’s integration into the data center infrastructure (VMs, containers, etc.) and performs the on-site evaluation in the data center.