MIT researchers develop Sandook to boost pooled SSD performance

MIT researchers have developed Sandook, a software system to boost performance and utilization of pooled SSDs in data centers.

• Main announcement:Sandook is a two-tier, software-only system (a global controller + local SSD controllers) that simultaneously addresses three sources of SSD variability—device wear/age, read-write interference, and garbage collection—and was tested on a pool of 10 SSDs, improving application throughput by 12–94%, increasing SSD capacity utilization by 23%, and enabling SSDs to reach 95% of theoretical maximum performance. The work will be presented at the USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation.
• Background & details: Sandook rotates read/write assignments, profiles SSD performance to detect garbage collection and reduce load on affected drives, requires no specialized hardware or application changes, and was evaluated on four tasks (database, machine-learning model training, image compression, user data storage). Authors include Gohar Chaudhry (lead author), Ankit Bhardwaj (Tufts University), Zhenyuan Ruan PhD ’24, and Adam Belay (MIT CSAIL). Funding came from the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and the Semiconductor Research Corporation.