MaxLinear and Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) announced a collaboration to enable hardware-accelerated OpenZFS File System storage for large-scale high-performance computing (HPC) environments. The two organizations jointly developed a hardware-accelerated OpenZFS storage architecture designed to improve performance and storage capacity for next-generation NVMe flash-based storage infrastructure.
LANL contributed Direct I/O support and Z.I.A. (ZFS Interface for Accelerators), a framework for introducing hardware acceleration into the ZFS data path. MaxLinear integrated its Panther Storage Accelerator SoCs, which provide inline hardware execution of ZFS data path services including deep data compression, encryption, deduplication, and data protection.
MaxLinear demonstrated hardware-offloaded ZFS operations with reported speedups of approximately 39x for writes and 7x for reads. The solution integrates Panther as a Data Processing Unit Services Module (DPUSM) provider, enabling inline acceleration of CPU-intensive operations such as data compression and checksum generation while preserving ZFS ordering, consistency, and data integrity guarantees.
Performance results achieved 57 GB/s read and 47 GB/s write with GZIP L9 at approximately 1.3:1 compression ratio. Without acceleration, ZFS performance was limited to approximately 1.2 GB/s writes and 8.1 GB/s reads.
“Los Alamos’ Direct I/O support and Z.I.A. work were developed to accelerate performance for the ZFS-using community,” said Gary Grider, Senior Director for Computing Technologies at the Laboratory. “In this collaboration, MaxLinear demonstrated hardware-offloaded ZFS operations with reported speedups of approximately 39x for writes and 7x for reads.”
“Los Alamos National Laboratory has been at the forefront of advancing storage architectures for high-performance computing,” said Vikas Choudhary, Executive Vice President of Connectivity & Storage at MaxLinear. “By enabling hardware-accelerated ZFS with Panther™ Storage Accelerators, we deliver deep data compression, data protection services, and multi-hundred gigabit scalability—while preserving the data integrity guarantees that ZFS is known for.”
The architecture supports scalable deployment of multiple Panther Storage Accelerators in parallel through ZIA.
