Multi-tenancy is essential for unleashing SmartNIC's potential in datacenters. Our systematic analysis in this work shows that existing on-path SmartNICs have resource multiplexing limitations. For example, existing solutions lack multi-tenancy capabilities such as performance isolation and QoS provisioning for compute and IO resources. Compared to standard NIC data paths with a well-defined set of offloaded functions, unpredictable execution times of SmartNIC kernels make conventional approaches for multi-tenancy and QoS insufficient. We fill this gap with OSMOSIS, a SmartNICs resource manager co-design. OSMOSIS extends existing OS mechanisms to enable dynamic hardware resource multiplexing of the on-path packet processing data plane. We integrate OSMOSIS within an open-source RISC-V-based 400Gbit/s SmartNIC. Our performance results demonstrate that OSMOSIS fully supports multi-tenancy and enables broader adoption of SmartNICs in datacenters with low overhead.
@article{arxiv.2309.03628,
title = {OSMOSIS: Enabling Multi-Tenancy in Datacenter SmartNICs},
author = {Mikhail Khalilov and Marcin Chrapek and Siyuan Shen and Alessandro Vezzu and Thomas Benz and Salvatore Di Girolamo and Timo Schneider and Daniele De Sensi and Luca Benini and Torsten Hoefler},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2309.03628},
year = {2024}
}