Publication
SmartNICs in the Cloud: The Why, What and How of In-network Processing for Data-Intensive Applications
Faeze Faghih; Tobias Ziegler; Zsolt István; Carsten Binnig
In: Pablo Barceló; Nayat Sánchez-Pi; Alexandra Meliou; S. Sudarshan (Hrsg.). Companion of the 2024 International Conference on Management of Data, SIGMOD/PODS 2024, Santiago, Chile, June 9-15, 2024. ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD), Pages 556-560, ACM, 2024.
Abstract
In modern datacenters and clouds, Resource Disaggregation has
been adopted as a way of offering scalability and efficient resource
utilization for large-scale applications. Provisioning CPU, memory,
and storage resources independently for distributed data-intensive
applications is a great enabler but it also brings challenges, es-
pecially in the form of networking and processing overhead. To
reduce this overhead and to make disaggregation-related tasks sig-
nificantly more efficient, cloud providers are offloading these to the
network, i.e., to Smart Network Interface Cards (SmartNICs) and
Smart Switches. Beyond this specific use-case, the presence of such
programmable hardware in commercial clouds creates future op-
portunities for offloading application-level operations, e.g., parts of
SQL queries or ML pipelines. To map out this exciting space, in this
tutorial we take a detailed look at SmartNICs, explaining how they
work, giving examples of what they are good for, and highlighting
how they can best be utilized to make future data-intensive and
distributed systems more efficient.