CSR: Small: Enabling In-Network Computation for Datacenter Applications

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The emergence of programmable network devices, such as reconfigurable switches and customizable network accelerators, along with the increasing traffic of data centers, motivate the use of in-network computation. Today's latest reconfigurable switches support configurable per-packet processing, including customizable packet headers, customizable packet processing, and the ability to maintain state inside the switch. Given this hardware trend, this project seeks to offload computing operations onto intermediate networking devices for a broad range of application services ranging from distributed storage to big data analytics and distributed machine learning, thus optimizing the operations of data center applications. The project's primary goal is to build a programming framework to enable in-network computing using programmable networking hardware. In designing and implementing this framework, the project addresses the following research questions: First, the project tackles how to best integrate reconfigurable switches and network accelerators into a data center network, as they both have limitations in terms of the operations that they can execute. Second, a key project goal is to identify what is a simple and yet powerful programming application program interface (API) for these programmable devices to support a broad class of applications. Third, another key challenge addressed is how to keep state and computations on these devices consistent with that of application servers, and how to co-design data center applications to take advantage of the performance benefits enabled by this paradigm. This project seeks to improve the efficiency of network-intensive data center applications that are used by literally billions of people around the globe on a daily basis. By improving their efficiency, one can dramatically reduce the cost of data center services as well as make it much cheaper for new public services to be developed. Collaborators at various switch vendors are equal partners in this effort, providing access to new technologies as well as assisting in technology transfer to the industry. The project will integrate undergraduate students as researchers, and material from the project will be incorporated into both undergraduate and graduate courses.A key project goal is to publicly release developed software and enable a rich set of high-performance data center applications. All software will be made public as soon as they are developed, hosted via GitHub at https://github.com/arvindkrish/incbricks and accessible from the project website at the University of Washington. A mirrored version of this repository will be maintained at the University for at least five years.