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Title: Breakfast of champions: towards zero-copy serialization with NIC scatter-gather
Microsecond I/O will make data serialization a major bottleneck for datacenter applications. Serialization is fundamentally about data movement: serialization libraries coalesce and flatten in-memory data structures into a single transmittable buffer. CPU-based serialization approaches will hit a performance limit due to data movement overheads and be unable to keep up with modern networks. We observe that widely deployed NICs possess scatter-gather capabilities that can be re-purposed to accelerate serialization's core task of coalescing and flattening in-memory data structures. It is possible to build a completely zero-copy, zero-allocation serialization library with commodity NICs. Doing so introduces many research challenges, including using the hardware capabilities efficiently for a wide variety of non-uniform data structures, making application memory available for zero-copy I/O, and ensuring memory safety.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1651570
PAR ID:
10327316
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
HotOS '21: Proceedings of the Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems
Page Range / eLocation ID:
199 to 205
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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