SKV: A SmartNIC-Offloaded Distributed Key-Value Store

In data center networks, applications such as dis-tributed key-value stores consume a lot of CPU resources. The performance of the entire system drops significantly under heavy load conditions. In order to improve the performance of key-value stores, many existing studies use RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) to reduce the communication overhead. However, RDMA primitives can only offload simple operations to the NIC, such as reading and writing remote memory. With the emergence of new hardware like SmartNICs, we consider whether we can offload more complex operations in distributed key-value stores to SmartNICs to reduce the load on CPU. In this paper we present SKV, a SmartNIC-offloaded distributed key-value store. In order to make full use of the offload ability of the SmartNIC, we make a detailed analysis on the characteristic and architecture of SmartNICs and distributed key-value stores. SKV offloads operations such as data replication to the SmartNIC. We design a new replication mechanism, which enables the server to separate background processing from the interaction with clients in the front. We implement SKV on the Mellanox BlueField SmartNIC. Our evaluations show that SKV improves the overall throughput by 14% and reduces latency by 21 % compared with baseline.