SuperNIC: an FPGA-Based, Cloud-Oriented SmartNIC

With CPU scaling slowing down in today's data centers, more functionalities are being offloaded from the CPU to auxiliary devices. One such device is the SmartNIC, which is being increasingly adopted in data centers. In today's cloud environment, VMs on the same server can each have their own network computation (or network tasks) or workflows of network tasks to offload to a SmartNIC. These network tasks can be dynamically added/removed as VMs come and go and can be shared across VMs. Such dynamism demands that a SmartNIC not only schedules and processes packets but also manages and executes offloaded network tasks for different users. Although software solutions like an OS exist for managing software-based network tasks, such software-based SmartNICs cannot keep up with the quickly increasing data-center network speed. This paper proposes a new SmartNIC platform called SuperNIC that allows multiple tenants to efficiently and safely offload FPGA-based network computation DAGs. For efficiency and scalability, our core idea is to group network tasks into virtual chains that are dynamically mapped to different forms of physical chains depending on load and FPGA space availability. We further propose techniques to automatically scale network task chains with different types of parallelism. Moreover, we propose a fair sharing mechanism that considers both fair space sharing and fair time sharing of different types of hardware resources. Our FPGA prototype of SuperNIC achieves high bandwidth and low latency performance whilst efficiently utilizing and fairly sharing resources.