NICA: OS support for near data network application accelerators

Today’s developers are facing tremendous challenges to keep up with skyrocketing network I/O rates. As CPU performance and memory bandwidth scaling stagnate, the compute capacity headroom for running network application logic is shrinking, leaving a few hundreds cycles for processing at line speed. To scale, future applications will have to break out of CPU-centric designs, instead processing data in flight on the NICs during the transfer. Emerging NIC architectures are turning this vision into reality, incorporating increasingly programmable compute elements. For example, recent Mellanox-Innova NICs host a large Xilinx FPGA which can perform any function or serve as a network endpoint itself. Cavium LiquidIO, EZChip TileMX100, Netronome Agilio SmartNIC and Mellanox Bluefield NICs (will) allow executing arbitrary custom processing functions implemented in C. Kaufmann et al. present a …