CAREER: NIC-Accelerated Active Messaging as a Generic Replacement for RDMA

University Of Illinois At Chicago, Chicago IL

Investigators

Abstract

The cloud supports many important services. This includes the applications that have driven the growth of the web like search and mail as well as new emerging applications that require machine learning. As the demand for these services continues to grow, there is also a need to scale the computation behind them. In the cloud, this is done by distributing the computation across many processors communicating across a high-speed network. Unfortunately, there is an increasing performance gap that is limiting our ability to scale these cloud applications. Processor performance has stagnated, yet network performance continues to increase exponentially to 100Gbps and beyond. As a result, in scaling these applications, existing networking stacks are struggling to fully utilize network resources because the computational costs of network communication are too high. This proposal aims to fundamentally rethink the design of server-side networking and develop new networking abstractions to address these problems. To accomplish this goal, the plan is to develop Network Interface Card (NIC) Accelerated Active Messaging (NAAM), a new networking framework. In NAAM, functions are written in a high-level language and then are compiled to a bytecode and verified before they are executed on a NIC. Importantly, this new paradigm exposes the full capabilities of NICs to accelerate message processing and offload computation from the main processors while still providing a simple and expressive interface to application programmers. The goal is to create a system that is easy to use for developers and operators while simultaneously ensuring security, performance, and scalability. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.