Compressive Sensing on Storage Data: An Effective Solution to Alleviate I/0 Bottleneck in Data- Intensive Workloads

The gap between computation speed and I/O access on modern computing systems imposes processing limitations in data-intensive applications. Employing high-end memory has proven not to enhance the performance for I/O bound applications, given the low utilization of memory bandwidth in such applications, as highlighted in recent studies. Despite several solutions to improve the performance of storage, none of them is able to shift the bottleneck from the I/O access to the memory subsystem for I/O bound applications. In this paper, we show that in the case of data-intensive multimedia applications, by using Compressive Sensing (CS), a lossy data compression method, the bottleneck is lifted from the storage, increasing the bandwidth utilization of the memory to gain further performance improvement from a high-end memory. The reconstruction of compressed data is however time and memory consuming. To address this challenge, we employ and compare the hardware and software acceleration of Orthogonal Matching Pursuit (OMP), a greedy algorithm, which solves the problem by choosing the most significant variable to reduce the least square error. Our implementation results show that CS increases memory bandwidth utilization by 1.4x and using high bandwidth memory results in 24% performance improvement. Overall, the proposed solution of CS of storage data with FPGA accelerator achieves up to 45% speedup in an end-to-end implementation by only 4.6% accuracy degradation.