The Case for a Network Fast Path to the CPU
Stephen Ibanez, Muhammad Mateen Shahbaz, Nick McKeown · 2019
For the past two decades, the communication channel between the NIC and CPU has largely remained the same---issuing memory requests across a slow PCIe peripheral interconnect. Today, with application service times and network fabric delays measuring hundreds of nanoseconds, the NIC--CPU interface can account for most of the overhead when programming modern warehouse-scale computers.