CAREER: NIC-Accelerated Active Messaging as a Generic Replacement for RDMA

云支持许多重要的服务。这包括推动网络增长的应用程序，如搜索和邮件，以及需要机器学习的新兴应用程序。随着对这些服务的需求持续增长，还需要扩展它们背后的计算。在云中，这是通过将计算分布在通过高速网络通信的多个处理器上来实现的。不幸的是，性能差距越来越大，限制了我们扩展这些云应用的能力。处理器性能停滞不前，但网络性能继续呈指数级增长，达到100Gbps甚至更高。因此，在扩展这些应用时，由于网络通信的计算成本太高，现有的网络堆栈难以充分利用网络资源。该提议旨在从根本上重新思考服务器端网络的设计，并开发新的网络抽象来解决这些问题。为了实现这一目标，计划开发网络接口卡(NIC)加速主动消息传递(NAAM)，这是一种新的网络框架。在NAAM中，函数是用高级语言编写的，然后被编译成字节码并在NIC上执行之前进行验证。重要的是，这种新的范例充分展示了NIC加速消息处理和从主处理器卸载计算的能力，同时仍然为应用程序程序员提供了一个简单且富有表现力的界面。目标是创建一个便于开发人员和运营商使用的系统，同时确保安全性、性能和可伸缩性。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The cloud supports many important services. This includes the applications that have driven the growth of the web like search and mail as well as new emerging applications that require machine learning. As the demand for these services continues to grow, there is also a need to scale the computation behind them. In the cloud, this is done by distributing the computation across many processors communicating across a high-speed network. Unfortunately, there is an increasing performance gap that is limiting our ability to scale these cloud applications. Processor performance has stagnated, yet network performance continues to increase exponentially to 100Gbps and beyond. As a result, in scaling these applications, existing networking stacks are struggling to fully utilize network resources because the computational costs of network communication are too high.This proposal aims to fundamentally rethink the design of server-side networking and develop new networking abstractions to address these problems. To accomplish this goal, the plan is to develop Network Interface Card (NIC) Accelerated Active Messaging (NAAM), a new networking framework. In NAAM, functions are written in a high-level language and then are compiled to a bytecode and verified before they are executed on a NIC. Importantly, this new paradigm exposes the full capabilities of NICs to accelerate message processing and offload computation from the main processors while still providing a simple and expressive interface to application programmers. The goal is to create a system that is easy to use for developers and operators while simultaneously ensuring security, performance, and scalability.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.