Design of a Distributed Compressor for Astronomy SSD

SSD (solid state device) has shown a great potential in astronomy data storage. Data compression is an essential task to obtain higher storage density and bandwidth. This paper proposes a distributed compressor customized for FPGA-based astronomy SSD. Our data-driven compressor cope with astronomy data in the unit of byte, two compression algorithms, run length and length-limited huffman are utilized, a distributed length-limited huffman encoder for SSD is further developed to reduce the latency. Experimental results indicate that our proposed compressor achieves a 1GB/s bandwidth with less than 2500 LUTs utilized while the compression ratio is only 10% lower than Gzip level9.