Panic: A high-performance programmable NIC for multi-tenant networks

Jiaxin Lin, Kiran Patel, Brent E. Stephens, Anirudh Sivaraman, Aditya Akella

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Programmable NICs have diverse uses, and there is a need for a NIC platform that can offload computation from multiple co-resident applications to many different types of substrates, including hardware accelerators, embedded FPGAs, and embedded processor cores. Unfortunately, there is no existing NIC design that can simultaneously support a large number of diverse offloads while ensuring high throughput/low latency, multi-tenant isolation, flexible offload chaining, and support for offloads with variable performance. This paper presents PANIC, a new programmable NIC. There are two new key components of the PANIC design that enable it to overcome the limitations of existing NICs: 1) A high-performance switching interconnect that scalably connects independent engines into offload chains, and 2) A new hybrid push/pull packet scheduler that provides cross-tenant performance isolation and low-latency load-balancing across parallel offload engines. From experiments performed on an 100 Gbps FPGA-based prototype, we find that this design overcomes the limitations of state-of-the-art programmable NICs.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 14th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation, OSDI 2020
PublisherUSENIX Association
Pages243-259
Number of pages17
ISBN (Electronic)9781939133199
StatePublished - 2020
Event14th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation,OSDI 2020 - Virtual, Online
Duration: Nov 4 2020Nov 6 2020

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 14th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation, OSDI 2020

Conference

Conference14th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation,OSDI 2020
CityVirtual, Online
Period11/4/2011/6/20

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Hardware and Architecture
  • Information Systems

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