A Hardware Filesystem Implementation with Multidisk Support

Modern High-End Computing systems frequently include FPGAs as compute accelerators. These programmable logic devices now support disk controller IP cores which offer the ability to introduce new, innovative functionalities that, previously, were not practical. This paper describes one such innovation: a filesystem implemented in hardware. This has the potential of improving the performance of data-intensive applications by connecting secondary storage directly to FPGA compute accelerators. To test the feasibility of this idea, a Hardware Filesystem was designed with four basic operations (open, read, write, and delete).