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

当今的云数据中心努力跟上大数据应用程序的计算需求（例如，社交媒体、视频流和人工智能），这些构成了我们现代技术社会的支柱。当前在终端主机服务器上执行计算，同时仅使用网络路由数据包的现状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。网内计算通过直接在网络交换机内部执行部分高级计算，可扩展和加速现代应用程序。然而，当今的交换机实现简单的无状态分组协议（例如，为了解决这一挑战，该提案寻求开发（1）一种有状态交换机架构，用于灵活地管理、计算和共享网络中的应用状态，而不仅仅是传统的分组处理;（2）网络范围的抽象和运行时，以在数据中心内共同编程和操作所提出的有状态交换机;最后，（3）一套代表性的应用程序和测试案例，以指导这些有状态交换机的设计和实现，通过探索他们的架构权衡。这项工作有可能大大提高大规模计算，现在广泛使用的研究人员，政府和企业在经济的各个部门。这个奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并已被认为是值得的支持，通过评估使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准。

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.