Date of Award
5-25-2024
Publication Type
Thesis
Degree Name
M.A.Sc.
Department
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Keywords
compression;deflate;fpga;gzip;nginx;web server
Supervisor
Mohammed Khalid
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Abstract
The growing need for faster data transfer and reduced delay in web server applications has generated considerable interest in hardware acceleration techniques that can improve performance beyond what can be achieved with conventional software-based solutions. Out of these options, Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) have become a highly promising technology because of their ability to be reconfigured, their high level of parallelism, and their efficiency. This study investigates the utilization of FPGAs to enhance the speed of web server operations. It specifically examines the incorporation of FPGA technology to enhance the management of SSL/TLS encryption and data compression which are vital elements in contemporary web servers. Our approach involves transferring computationally intensive tasks, such as SSL encryption, GZIP and DEFLATE compression, to a Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). This results in around 60-70% faster compression for gzip and Deflate LZ77 algorithms, allowing for more available resources to handle additional user requests and enhance the overall responsiveness of the server. However, due to the distributed nature of the architecture, bottlenecks in the overall performance were observed varying from 16 to 90% depending upon file structures which are investigated. Performance evaluations demonstrate that web servers accelerated by FPGA achieve significant enhancements in both throughput and latency when compared to conventional servers that rely solely on CPU. This study highlights the effectiveness of FPGAs in improving web server performance and offers a flexible solution to handle the increasing traffic requirements on web infrastructure.
Recommended Citation
Quamar, Belal, "Acceleration of a Web Server using FPGA" (2024). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 9408.
https://scholar.uwindsor.ca/etd/9408