COPA Use Case: Distributed Secure Joint Computation

Data centers provide good environments for distributed computing as they are easily accessible and may have low-latency communication between nodes [1] ; often, however, performance is limited by network bandwidth. These network bottlenecks drive the need for alternative communication resources to improve performance of large-scale applications. SmartNICs [2] – [4] have been introduced to perform the same tasks of standard NICs, but contain additional resources to allow for network function optimization with additional hardware. Adoption of SmartNICs continues to increase as a means to accelerate network functions and offload packet processing tasks away from CPU resources [5] – [13] .