Offloading distributed applications onto smartNICs using iPipe
Ming Liu, Tianyi Cui, Henry N. Schuh, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Simon Peter, Karan Gupta · 2019
Emerging Multicore SoC SmartNICs, enclosing rich computing resources (e.g., a multicore processor, onboard DRAM, accelerators, programmable DMA engines), hold the potential to offload generic datacenter server tasks. However, it is unclear how to use a SmartNIC efficiently and maximize the offloading benefits, especially for distributed applications. Towards this end, we characterize four commodity SmartNICs and summarize the offloading performance implications from four perspectives: traffic control, computing capability, onboard memory, and host communication.