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Title: Floem: A Programming System for NIC-Accelerated Network Applications
Developing server applications that offload computation and data to a NIC accelerator is laborious because one has to explore the design space of decisions about data placement and caching; partitioning of code and its parallelism; and communication strategies between program components across devices. We propose programming abstractions for NIC-accelerated applications, balancing the ease of developing a correct application and the ability to refactor it to explore different design choices. The design space includes semantic changes as well as variations on parallelization and program-to-resource mapping. Our abstractions include logical and physical queues and a construct for mapping the former onto the latter; global per-packet state; a remote caching construct; and an interface to external application code. We develop Floem, a programming system that provides these abstractions, and show that the system helps explore a space of NIC-offloading designs for real-world applications, including a key-value store and a distributed real-time data analytics system, improving throughput by 1.3--3.6x.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1751231
NSF-PAR ID:
10079073
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
13th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI 18)
Page Range / eLocation ID:
663-679
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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