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Multiple vendors have recently released SmartNICs that provide both special-purpose accelerators and programmable processing cores that allow increasingly sophisticated packet processing tasks to be offloaded from general-purpose CPUs. Indeed, leading data-center operators have designed and deployed SmartNICs at scale to support both network virtualization and application-specific tasks. Unfortunately, cloud providers have not yet opened up the full power of these devices to tenants, as current runtimes do not provide adequate isolation between individual applications running on the SmartNICs themselves. We introduce FairNIC, a system to provide performance isolation between tenants utilizing the full capabilities of a commodity SoC SmartNIC. We implement FairNIC on Cavium LiquidIO 2360s and show that we are able to isolate not only typical packet processing, but also prevent MIPS-core cache pollution and fairly share access to fixed-function hardware accelerators. We use FairNIC to implement NIC-accelerated OVS and key/value store applications and show that they both can cohabitate on a single NIC using the same port, where the performance of each is unimpacted by other tenants. We argue that our results demonstrate the feasibility of sharing SmartNICs among virtual tenants, and motivate the development of appropriate security isolation mechanisms. 

Sprocket is a highly configurable, stage-based, scalable, serverless video processing framework that exploits intra-video parallelism to achieve low latency. Sprocket enables developers to program a series of operations over video content in a modular, extensible manner. Programmers implement custom operations, ranging from simple video transformations to more complex computer vision tasks, in a simple pipeline specification language to construct custom video processing pipelines. Sprocket then handles the underlying access, encoding and decoding, and processing of video and image content across operations in a highly parallel manner. In this paper we describe the design and implementation of the Sprocket system on the AWS Lambda serverless cloud infrastructure, and evaluate Sprocket under a variety of conditions to show that it delivers its performance goals of high parallelism, low latency, and low cost (10s of seconds to process a 3,600 second video 1000-way parallel for less than $3).