An Evaluation of WebAssembly and eBPF as Offloading Mechanisms in the Context of Computational Storage

Wenjun Huang; Marcus Paradies

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arXiv · 2111.01947

An Evaluation of WebAssembly and eBPF as Offloading Mechanisms in the Context of Computational Storage

Wenjun Huang·Marcus Paradies

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Abstract

As the volume of data that needs to be processed continues to increase, we also see renewed interests in near-data processing in the form of computational storage, with eBPF (extended Berkeley Packet Filter) being proposed as a vehicle for computation offloading. However, discussions in this regard have so far ignored viable alternatives, and no convincing analysis has been provided. As such, we qualitatively and quantitatively evaluated eBPF against WebAssembly, a seemingly similar technology, in the context of computation offloading. This report presents our findings.

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Wenjun Huang, Marcus Paradies. 2021-10-22. An Evaluation of WebAssembly and eBPF as Offloading Mechanisms in the Context of Computational Storage. https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.01947

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