Application Offloading

Huỳnh Nhật Quang, Nguyễn Đức Tài, Nguyễn Hữu Thắng,

Phạm Nguyễn Thiên Phúc, Nguyễn Gia Phần, Dương Tiến Thành
VNU-HCM

Abstract: Network speed became significantly faster than CPU performance, forcing many data center applications to sacrifice application cycles for packet
processing. The literature shows that there is a gap between a general-purpose CPU and a network processor ASIC. Exploiting SmartNICs capabilities to
improve TCP performance is a challenging task due to the network protocol stack design.
As a result, developers have started to offload computation to programmable NICs, dramatically improving the performance and energy efficiency of many
data center applications. However, implementing data center network applications in a combined CPU-NIC environment is challenging

1. Introduction 3. Application Offloading Comparison, Discussions, and Limitations

 λ-NIC, a system that aims at offloading serverless workloads to
SmartNICs. Serverless workloads are referred to as fine-grained
functions with short service times and memory usage. If correctly
balanced and distributed, serverless applications can be more efficient
and cost-saving. The authors used SmartNICs, or more specifically
ASIC-based NICs, to run these lambdas more efficiently.
 ASIC-based NICs consist of hundreds of Reduced Instruction Set
Computer (RISC) processors (i.e., NPU) with independent local
instruction storage and memory. Consequently, these SmartNICs-unlike
GPUs and FPGAs, optimized to accelerate specific workloads, are
more suitable for running many discrete functions in parallel at high
speed and low latency.
 Table 12 compares the schemes described in previous sections. P4-
based NICs are continually evolving to support new features. NICs can
now host advanced features, such as protocol offloading, packet
classification, rate limiting, cryptographic functions, and virtualization.
 However, a drawback of P4-based NICs is the complexity of the
platforms. High-level programmable platforms support limited network
functions. Existing NICs do not offer a systematic methodology for
chaining multiple offload capabilities.
 P4-programmable NICs present a higher level of flexibility and
programmability. These programmable NICs can offload almost any
packet processing function from the server. Moreover, they employ
energy-efficient processors compared to x86-based server processors,
achieving higher energy efficiency in packet processing.

2. Literature Review

4. Comparison with Legacy Approaches

 In this model, λs are completely independent programs . The matching
stage operates as a scheduler that forwards packets to the matching
lambdas or the host OS. In the last stage, a parser handles packet
operations. The authors developed an open-source implementation of λ-
NIC using P4-enabled SmartNICs. They also implemented the
methodologies to optimize λs to utilize the SmartNIC resources
efficiently. Results show that λ-NIC achieves a maximum of 880x in
workloads’ response latency and 736x more throughput reducing the main
CPU and memory usage. A scheme called nanoPU, which minimizes the
tail-latency for Remote Procedure Calls (RPC). The system mitigates the
causes of high. RPC tail latency by bypassing the cache and memory
hierarchy. The nanoPU directly places arriving messages into the CPU
register file. Figure 25 shows the block diagram of the nanoPU
 P4-programmable NICs can be:
 present specialized packet engines that allow the implementation of a
variety of protocol accelerators
 considered as a generalpurpose offloading platform to develop
key/value store applications, microservices, and other types of network
functions
 considered network accelerators capable of offloading communication
routines and computational kernels from the CPU.
 extended to support applications, thus minimizing CPU intervention.
 Programmable NICs that do not use P4 language (e.g., Mellanox
BlueField SmartNICs [153]) present a lower degree of flexibility,
making the development process more difficult and closed to a vendor
technology. P4-programmable NICs offer similar performance and a
scalable solution for large and diverse deployments.
 More ever, it can be extended to support applications, thus minimizing
CPU intervention.