D-NOVA: In-Storage Retrieval Accelerator via Dual-Bound 3D NAND-Optimized Similarity Search with Vector Adaptation
Mirrored from arXiv — NLP / Computation & Language for archival readability. Support the source by reading on the original site.
Computer Science > Hardware Architecture
arXiv:2607.17538 (cs)
[Submitted on 20 Jul 2026]
Title:D-NOVA: In-Storage Retrieval Accelerator via Dual-Bound 3D NAND-Optimized Similarity Search with Vector Adaptation
View a PDF of the paper titled D-NOVA: In-Storage Retrieval Accelerator via Dual-Bound 3D NAND-Optimized Similarity Search with Vector Adaptation, by Chang Eun Song and 5 other authors
View PDF
HTML (experimental)
Abstract:Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enhances the factual grounding of large language model (LLM) inference by retrieving relevant information from external knowledge bases. However, its dense vector retrieval introduces significant latency and energy overhead, becoming the primary performance bottleneck. Although recent in-storage accelerators aim to reduce data movement, they still rely on host or embedded processors outside the memory, where nearly 70% of the total retrieval time is spent. As a result, they cannot fully overcome the bandwidth limitations, leading to yet another memory bottleneck. To tackle these limitations, we present D-NOVA, a hardware-software co-designed in-storage retrieval accelerator. D-NOVA executes an inverted file (IVF)-based hierarchical retrieval pipeline by deeply embedding the search functionality directly into the NAND memory array. This is achieved by incorporating a new distance metric, Dual-Bound Tight Similarity Sensing (DTS), which is specifically tailored for searching within the NAND string. In addition, we introduce a lightweight contrastive adapter that maps embedding vectors into a DTS-friendly domain, recovering near-software recall while improving performance and energy efficiency. D-NOVA is up to 41.7x faster and 71x more energy-efficient than a CPU baseline, and achieves 12.13x higher throughput while being up to 1.26x more energy-efficient than state-of-the-art in-storage RAG accelerators, demonstrating the potential of fully in-storage vector search for scalable RAG acceleration.
| Comments: | Accepted at the 59th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO 2026), Athens, Greece. Chang Eun Song and Sumukh Pinge are co-first authors and contributed equally |
| Subjects: | Hardware Architecture (cs.AR); Computation and Language (cs.CL); Databases (cs.DB); Emerging Technologies (cs.ET); Information Retrieval (cs.IR) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2607.17538 [cs.AR] |
| (or arXiv:2607.17538v1 [cs.AR] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.17538
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
|
Full-text links:
Access Paper:
- View PDF
- HTML (experimental)
- TeX Source
View a PDF of the paper titled D-NOVA: In-Storage Retrieval Accelerator via Dual-Bound 3D NAND-Optimized Similarity Search with Vector Adaptation, by Chang Eun Song and 5 other authors
Current browse context:
cs.AR
References & Citations
Loading...
Bookmark
Bibliographic Tools
Code, Data, Media
Demos
Related Papers
About arXivLabs
Bibliographic and Citation Tools
Bibliographic Explorer Toggle
Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?)
Connected Papers Toggle
Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?)
Litmaps Toggle
Litmaps (What is Litmaps?)
scite.ai Toggle
scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?)
Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article
alphaXiv Toggle
alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?)
Links to Code Toggle
CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?)
DagsHub Toggle
DagsHub (What is DagsHub?)
GotitPub Toggle
Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?)
Huggingface Toggle
Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?)
ScienceCast Toggle
ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?)
Demos
Replicate Toggle
Replicate (What is Replicate?)
Spaces Toggle
Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?)
Spaces Toggle
TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?)
Recommenders and Search Tools
Link to Influence Flower
Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?)
Core recommender toggle
CORE Recommender (What is CORE?)
arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators
arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.
Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.
Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.
Discussion (0)
Sign in to join the discussion. Free account, 30 seconds — email code or GitHub.
Sign in →No comments yet. Sign in and be the first to say something.