Caribou [1] is smart distributed storage built with FPGAs. Each node stores key-value pairs in main memory and exposes a simple interface over TCP/IP [2] that software clients can connect to.

It is smart because it is possible to offload filtering into the storage nodes. The nodes can also perform scans on the data. In this design filtering is a combination of regular expression matching and predicate evaluation. Different types of processing can, however, easily be added to the processing pipeline.

It is distributed because it runs on multiple FPGAs that replicate the data using a leader-based consensus protocol [3] that is both low latency and high throughput.

It is storage because it stores key-value pairs in a Cuckoo hash table and implements slab-based memory allocation. The current design uses DRAM to store data, as an exploration for solutions that will work well with the emerging non-volatile memory technologies.

[1] Caribou: Intelligent Distributed Storage. Zs. Istvan, D. Sidler, G. Alonso. To appear in VLDB 2017, Munich, Germany. https://people.inf.ethz.ch/zistvan/doc/vldb17-caribou.pdf

[2] Low-Latency TCP/IP Stack for Data Center Applications. D. Sidler, Zs. Istvan, G. Alonso. 26th International Conference on Field Programmable Logic and Applications (FPL'16), Lausanne, Switzerland, September 2016. http:https://davidsidler.ch/files/fpl16-lowlatencytcpip.pdf

[3] Consensus in a Box: Inexpensive Coordination in Hardware. Zs. Istvan, D. Sidler, G. Alonso, M. Vukolic. 13th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI '16), March 2016. https://people.inf.ethz.ch/zistvan/doc/nsdi16-istvan-rev1.pdf