Collaborative Research: CNS Core: Medium: A Stateful Switch Architecture for In-Network Compute

如今的云数据中心难以满足构成现代技术社会支柱的大数据应用（如社交媒体、视频流和人工智能）的计算需求。目前的现状是，在终端主机服务器上执行计算，同时只使用网络来路由数据包，这限制了这些数据中心扩展到不断增长的分布式和高性能计算（HPC）应用程序。网络内计算通过直接在网络交换机中执行部分高级计算来扩展和加速现代应用程序。然而，今天的交换机实现简单的无状态数据包协议（例如，路由和转发），不能执行运行分布式应用程序所需的复杂的有状态操作。为了应对这一挑战，该提案寻求开发(1)一种有状态交换机架构，用于灵活管理、计算和共享网络中应用程序的状态，而不仅仅是传统的数据包处理；(2)网络范围的抽象和运行时，以便在数据中心内对拟议的有状态交换机进行编程和操作；最后，(3)一套代表性的应用程序和测试用例，通过探索它们的架构权衡来指导这些有状态开关的设计和实现。这项工作具有显著增强大规模计算的潜力，现在被研究人员、政府和经济各个部门的企业广泛使用。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Today's cloud data centers struggle to keep up with the computing demands of big-data applications (e.g., social media, video streaming, and artificial intelligence) that form the backbone of our modern technological society. The current status-quo of executing compute at the end-host servers while using networks for routing packets only, restricts these data centers from scaling to ever-growing distributed and high-performance computing (HPC) applications. In-network computing scales and accelerate modern applications by performing parts of the high-level computation directly inside the network switches. However, today’s switches implement simple, stateless packet protocols (e.g., routing and forwarding) and cannot perform complicated stateful operations needed to run distributed applications.To address this challenge, the proposal seeks to develop (1) a stateful switch architecture for flexible management, computation, and sharing of applications' state in the network, beyond just traditional packet processing; (2) a network-wide abstraction and runtime to program and operate the proposed stateful switches collectively within a data center; and, lastly, (3) a suite of representative applications and test cases to guide the design and implementation of these stateful switches by exploring their architectural trade-offs. This work has the potential to significantly enhance large scale computation now used widely by researchers, the government and businesses in every sector of the economy.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.