SwarmIO: Towards 100 Million IOPS SSD Emulation for Next-generation GPU-centric Storage Systems

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Kim, Hyeseong, Yeo, Gwangoo, Rhu, Minsoo
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Kim, Hyeseong
Yeo, Gwangoo
Rhu, Minsoo
author_facet Kim, Hyeseong
Yeo, Gwangoo
Rhu, Minsoo
contents GPU-initiated I/O has emerged as a key mechanism for achieving high-throughput storage access by leveraging massive GPU thread-level parallelism, while recent industry trends point toward SSDs optimized for ultra-high random-read IOPS. Together, these trends are enabling the emergence of IOPS-optimized, GPU-centric storage systems. Despite this momentum, no existing framework enables quantitative end-to-end evaluation of storage systems optimized for GPU-initiated I/O. While conventional SSD emulators provide a promising path toward end-to-end modeling in traditional storage systems, they face three key challenges in this GPU-centric setting: limited frontend scalability for ingesting massive request streams, high software overhead in emulating GPU-initiated I/O control and data paths, and excessive timing-model maintenance overhead at extremely high I/O request rates. We propose SwarmIO, an SSD emulator for massively parallel, GPU-centric storage. SwarmIO faithfully models IOPS-optimized SSDs at target performance levels of up to 40 MIOPS, achieving a 303.9x speedup over the state-of-the-art baseline SSD emulator under GPU-initiated I/O. We further demonstrate its utility through a vector search case study, showing that increasing SSD IOPS from 2.5 MIOPS to 40 MIOPS yields an average end-to-end speedup of up to 9.7x.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_06668
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SwarmIO: Towards 100 Million IOPS SSD Emulation for Next-generation GPU-centric Storage Systems
Kim, Hyeseong
Yeo, Gwangoo
Rhu, Minsoo
Hardware Architecture
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
GPU-initiated I/O has emerged as a key mechanism for achieving high-throughput storage access by leveraging massive GPU thread-level parallelism, while recent industry trends point toward SSDs optimized for ultra-high random-read IOPS. Together, these trends are enabling the emergence of IOPS-optimized, GPU-centric storage systems. Despite this momentum, no existing framework enables quantitative end-to-end evaluation of storage systems optimized for GPU-initiated I/O. While conventional SSD emulators provide a promising path toward end-to-end modeling in traditional storage systems, they face three key challenges in this GPU-centric setting: limited frontend scalability for ingesting massive request streams, high software overhead in emulating GPU-initiated I/O control and data paths, and excessive timing-model maintenance overhead at extremely high I/O request rates. We propose SwarmIO, an SSD emulator for massively parallel, GPU-centric storage. SwarmIO faithfully models IOPS-optimized SSDs at target performance levels of up to 40 MIOPS, achieving a 303.9x speedup over the state-of-the-art baseline SSD emulator under GPU-initiated I/O. We further demonstrate its utility through a vector search case study, showing that increasing SSD IOPS from 2.5 MIOPS to 40 MIOPS yields an average end-to-end speedup of up to 9.7x.
title SwarmIO: Towards 100 Million IOPS SSD Emulation for Next-generation GPU-centric Storage Systems
topic Hardware Architecture
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.06668