Related papers: Performance Characteristics of the BlueField-2 Sma…
New hardware, such as SmartNICs, has been released to offload network applications in data centers. Off-path SmartNICs, a type of multi-core SoC SmartNICs, have attracted the attention of many researchers. Unfortunatelly, they lack the…
Many distributed applications implement complex data flows and need a flexible mechanism for routing data between producers and consumers. Recent advances in programmable network interface cards, or SmartNICs, represent an opportunity to…
SmartNICs have recently emerged as an appealing device for accelerating distributed systems. However, there has not been a comprehensive characterization of SmartNICs, and existing designs typically only leverage a single communication path…
This work evaluates the benefits of using a "smart" network interface card (SmartNIC) as a compute accelerator for the example of the MiniMD molecular dynamics proxy application. The accelerator is NVIDIA's BlueField-2 card, which includes…
The exponential growth of data traffic and the increasing complexity of networked applications demand effective solutions capable of passively inspecting and analysing the network traffic for monitoring and security purposes. Implementing…
Although modern, AI-centric datacenters heavily rely on SmartNICs, existing devices impose a hard trade-off. Commercial SmartNICs provide high bandwidth and easy software integration, but offer limited support for customization and data…
As the gap between network and CPU speeds rapidly increases, the CPU-centric network stack proves inadequate due to excessive CPU and memory overhead. While hardware-offloaded network stacks alleviate these issues, they suffer from limited…
With the advent of programmable network hardware, more and more functionality can be moved from software running on general purpose CPUs to the NIC. Early NICs only allowed offloading fixed functions like checksum computation. Recent NICs…
SmartNICs are touted as an attractive substrate for network application offloading, offering benefits in programmability, host resource saving, and energy efficiency. The current usage restricts offloading to local hosts and confines…
Network speeds grow quickly in the modern cloud, so SmartNICs are introduced to offload network processing tasks, even application logic. However, typical multicore SmartNICs such as BlueFiled-2 are only capable of processing control-plane…
With CPU scaling slowing down in today's data centers, more functionalities are being offloaded from the CPU to auxiliary devices. One such device is the SmartNIC, which is being increasingly adopted in data centers. In today's cloud…
Load balancers are pervasively used inside today's clouds to scalably distribute network requests across data center servers. Given the extensive use of load balancers and their associated operating costs, several efforts have focused on…
Network function (NF) offloading on SmartNICs has been widely used in modern data centers, offering benefits in host resource saving and programmability. Co-running NFs on the same SmartNICs can cause performance interference due to…
SmartNICs have been increasingly utilized across various applications to offload specific computational tasks, thereby enhancing overall system performance. However, this offloading process introduces several communication challenges that…
There is a growing interest in serverless compute, a cloud computing model that automates infrastructure resource-allocation and management while billing customers only for the resources they use. Workloads like stream processing benefit…
Pervasive encryption makes large-scale labeling infeasible for traffic analysis, while security operations demand edge analysis to avert service degradation and further vulnerabilities. These pressures have produced two disjoint research…
Federated learning is a distributed machine learning approach where local weight parameters trained by clients locally are aggregated as global parameters by a server. The global parameters can be trained without uploading privacy-sensitive…
Host CPU resources are heavily consumed by TCP stack processing, limiting scalability in data centers. Existing offload methods typically address only partial functionality or lack flexibility. This paper introduces PnO (Plug & Offload), an…
AI training and inference impose sustained, fine-grain I/O that stresses host-mediated, TCP-based storage paths. Motivated by kernel-bypass networking and user-space storage stacks, we revisit POSIX-compatible object storage for GPU-centric…
The end of Moore's Law and Dennard Scaling has slowed processor improvements in the past decade. While multi-core processors have improved performance, they are limited by the application's level of parallelism, as prescribed by Amdahl's…