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Demystifying Datapath Accelerator Enhanced Off-path SmartNIC by Chen, Xuzheng; Zhang, Jie; Fu, Ting; Shen, Yifan; Ma, Shu; Qian, Kun; Zhu, Lingjun; Shi, Chao; Zhang, Yin; Liu, Ming; Wang, Zeke is a scholarly article available to read on EtoBox.

What is Demystifying Datapath Accelerator Enhanced Off-path SmartNIC about?

Network speeds grow quickly in the modern cloud, so SmartNICs are introduced to offload network processing tasks, even application logic. However, typical multicore SmartNICs such as BlueFiled-2 are only capable of processing control-plane tasks with their embedded processors that have limited memory bandwidth and computing power. On the other hand, cloud applications evolve rapidly, such that a limited number of fixed hardware engines in a SmartNIC cannot satisfy the requirements of cloud applications. Therefore, SmartNIC programmers call for a programmable datapath accelerator (DPA) to process network traffic at line rate. However, no existing work has unveiled the performance characteristics of the existing DPA. To this end, we present the first architectural characterization of the latest DPA-enhanced BlueFiled-3 (BF3) SmartNIC. Our evaluation results indicate that BF3's DPA is significantly wimpier than the off-path Arm processor and the host CPU. However, we still identify that DPA has three unique architectural characteristics that unleash the performance potential of DPA. Specifically, we demonstrate how to take advantage of DPA's three architectural characteristics regardi

Author

Chen, Xuzheng; Zhang, Jie; Fu, Ting; Shen, Yifan; Ma, Shu; Qian, Kun; Zhu, Lingjun; Shi, Chao; Zhang, Yin; Liu, Ming; Wang, Zeke

Published

2024

Language

EN