FORC: A High-Throughput Streaming FPGA Accelerator for Optimized Row Columnar File Decoders in Big Data Engines

To improve the file storage efficiency of large datasets, big data analytics usually use some common file formats, such as Apache ORC (optimized row columnar) format, to encode and compress the data. However, this shifts the IO bottleneck (especially with high-bandwidth SSDs) to the computation bottleneck on CPUs to decompress and decode the data. This paper presents FORC, a high-throughput streaming-based FPGA accelerator overlay that supports different ORC file format decoders, and its dataflow integration with Apache ORC. Experimental results show that FORC achieves up to 12.9 GB/s decoding throughput on AMD/Xilinx Alveo U280 FPGA, with a geomean speedup of 65x (up to 335x) over the CPU. FORC will be released soon at https://github.com/SFU-HiAccel/FORC.