A data storage device includes: a data storage medium; a processor comprising a plurality of processor cores; a plurality of application acceleration black-box (AABB) slots including reconfigurable logic blocks, interconnects, and memories; a host interface that receives a host command from a remote application running on a remote host computer, wherein the host command includes an image file including a register-transfer level (RTL) bitstream and a firmware driver; and a configuration controller that downloads the RTL bitstream to an AABB slot of the plurality of AABB slots and reconfigure the AABB slot, and load the firmware driver to a processor core of the processor. The processor core loaded with the firmware driver runs a data acceleration process of the remote application to access and process data stored in the data storage medium using the RTL bitstream downloaded in the AABB slot.