Collaborative Research: PPoSS: Planning: Making Smart Use of SmartNICs

协作研究：PPoSS：规划：巧妙利用 SmartNIC

• 批准号: 2028771
• 负责人: Arvind Krishnamurthy
• 金额: $ 8万
• 依托单位: University of Washington
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2020
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2020-10-01 至 2021-09-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2028771&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Research; PPoSS; Planning; Making

Computing paradigms occasionally undergo rather dramatic shifts as underlying technologies change, significantly modifying the dominant use cases. Some of these revolutions are seen far in advance and are heralded by great fanfare, with the hype long preceding the actual payoffs. Others are more opportunistic in nature, leveraging a technology initially developed for another purpose, and the adoption of this technology starts altering practice without much notice from the broader community. Computing is now on the verge of such a “quiet revolution” having to do with inserting computation on the devices that connect computers to the network. This trend towards what are called SmartNICs (for computationally enhanced network interface cards) shows great promise in both making applications faster and in keeping data more secure. This project will focus on how to best leverage SmartNICs in order to improve application performance and security.SmartNICs were originally designed to offload packet-processing from the host CPU, which processing is necessary in certain settings to perform encryption and other compute-intensive tasks on the data path. SmartNICs combine this packet-processing power with three other characteristics: (i) isolation from the host CPU, (ii) direct access to memory, and (iii) general programmability. It turns out that this combination gives SmartNICs the potential to play a powerful and unique role in the overall computational ecosystem. In particular, by sitting on the boundary between the network and hosts, they can change the interfaces being exposed to both, allowing SmartNICs to substantially improve application performance while also providing greater security and privacy. However, realizing these gains requires making progress on three separate issues. First, the hardware design of SmartNICs must combine several different units (a specialized packet-handling unit, an remote direct memory access unit, and a general computation unit), and provide fast interconnections between them and with the host memory. The design space is vast, and there is little agreement on what designs represent the best trade-offs. Second, these SmartNICs must offer applications a set of primitives that can improve their performance and security. These primitives must be chosen wisely to be feasible for SmartNICs to support while being easy for applications to leverage for better performance and security. Third, verification tools are needed to ensure that the programs on the SmartNIC are correctly executed and that the overall system -- running on multiple hosts and their SmartNICs -- is correct. This will require extensions to current verification techniques.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

随着潜在技术的变化，计算范式偶尔会发生相当巨大的变化，从而显着改变了主要用例。这些革命中的某些革命提前远，并被大夸张的大张旗鼓预示着，在实际收益之前炒作了。其他人本质上更具机会主义，利用最初是为另一个目的开发的技术，并且该技术的采用开始改变实践，而没有更广泛的社区通知。现在，计算与将计算机连接到网络的设备上插入计算有关的“安静革命”的边缘。朝着所谓的智能现象（用于计算增强的网络接口卡）的趋势在更快地使应用程序更加安全方面显示出很大的希望。该项目将重点关注如何最好地利用智能智能，以提高应用程序性能和安全性。Smartnics最初旨在从主机CPU卸载数据包处理，在某些设置中需要进行处理以执行加密和数据路径上的其他计算密集型任务。 Smartnics将此数据包处理能力与其他三个特征相结合：（i）与主机CPU的隔离，（ii）直接访问内存以及（iii）一般编程能力。事实证明，这种组合使Smartnics具有在整个计算生态系统中发挥强大而独特的作用的潜力。特别是，通过坐在网络和主机之间的边界上，他们可以更改所面临的两者的接口，从而使智能机构可以实质上提高应用程序性能，同时还提供更大的安全性和隐私。但是，意识到这些收益需要在三个不同的问题上取得进展。首先，智能设计的硬件设计必须结合几个不同的单元（专门的数据包处理单元，远程直接内存访问单元和一般计算单元），并在它们之间以及主机内存之间提供快速的互连。设计空间很宽，关于哪些设计代表了最佳权衡，几乎没有达成共识。其次，这些智能机构必须为应用程序提供一组可以提高其性能和安全性的基础。必须明智地选择这些原语，以使智能机构提供支持，同时易于应用程序以利用更好的性能和安全性。第三，需要验证工具来确保正确执行智能的程序，并且在多个主机及其智能机构上运行的整个系统是正确的。这将需要对当前验证技术进行扩展。该奖项反映了NSF的法定任务，并通过使用基金会的知识分子优点和更广泛的影响审查标准来评估，被认为是珍贵的支持。

项目成果

Offloading load balancers onto SmartNICs

将负载均衡器卸载到 SmartNIC 上

• DOI: 10.1145/3476886.3477505
• 发表时间: 2021
• 期刊: APSys
• 作者: Cui, Tianyi;Zhang, Wei;Zhang, Kaiyuan;Krishnamurthy, Arvind
• 通讯作者: Krishnamurthy, Arvind