Related papers: FlexiNS: A SmartNIC-Centric, Line-Rate and Flexibl…
Today's data centers consist of thousands of network-connected hosts, each with CPUs and accelerators such as GPUs and FPGAs. These hosts also contain network interface cards (NICs), operating at speeds of 100Gb/s or higher, that are used…
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…
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…
High-performance computing (HPC) researchers have long envisioned scenarios where application workflows could be improved through the use of programmable processing elements embedded in the network fabric. Recently, vendors have introduced…
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…
SmartNIC Data Processing Units (DPUs) offer a promising solution for saving high-end CPU resources by offloading tasks to programmable cores near the network interface. In this work, we explore the feasibility of SmartNIC DPUs in supporting…
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…
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…
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…
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…
After a decade of research in userspace network stacks, why do new solutions remain inaccessible to most developers? We argue that this is because they ignored (1) the hardware constraints of public cloud NICs (vNICs) and (2) the…
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…
The fast pace at which new online services emerge leads to a rapid surge in the volume of network traffic. A recent approach that the research community has proposed to tackle this issue is in-network computing, which means that network…
Recently SmartNICs are widely used to accelerate service chains in NFV. However, when the SmartNIC is overloaded, casually migrating vNFs away from SmartNIC to CPU may lead to additional packet transmissions between SmartNIC and CPU. To…
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…
As large language models (LLMs) continue to scale, multi-node deployment has become a necessity. Consequently, communication has become a critical performance bottleneck. Current intra-node communication libraries, like NCCL, typically make…
This paper introduces FlexNN, a Flexible Neural Network accelerator, which adopts agile design principles to enable versatile dataflows, enhancing energy efficiency. Unlike conventional convolutional neural network accelerator architectures…
Emerging interconnects, such as CXL and NVLink, have been integrated into the intra-host topology to scale more accelerators and facilitate efficient communication between them, such as GPUs. To keep pace with the accelerator's growing…
A key enabling technology of NFV is software dataplane, which has attracted much attention in both academia and industry recently. Yet, till now there is little understanding about its performance in practice. In this paper, we make a…
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…