SmartNIC Performance Isolation with FairNIC
Stewart Grant, Anil Yelam, Maxwell Troy Bland, Alex C. Snoeren · 2020
Multiple vendors have recently released SmartNICs that provide both special-purpose accelerators and programmable processing cores that allow increasingly sophisticated packet processing tasks to be offloaded from general-purpose CPUs. Indeed, leading data-center operators have designed and deployed SmartNICs at scale to support both network virtualization and application-specific tasks. Unfortunately, cloud providers have not yet opened up the full power of these devices to tenants, as current runtimes do not provide adequate isolation between individual applications running on the SmartNICs themselves.