Demystifying Datapath Accelerator Enhanced Off-path SmartNIC
Xuzheng Chen, Jie Zhang, Ting Fu, Yifan Shen, Shu Ma, Kun Qian,, Lingjun Zhu, Chao Shi, Yin Zhang, Ming Liu, and Zeke Wang

TL;DR
This paper provides the first detailed analysis of the architectural performance of the DPA-enhanced BlueFiled-3 SmartNIC, revealing its limitations and potential, and offers guidelines to optimize its use for network processing tasks.
Contribution
It is the first to characterize the DPA in BlueFiled-3 SmartNIC and proposes optimization guidelines to improve its performance in cloud network processing.
Findings
DPA in BF3 is less powerful than Arm processor and host CPU.
Three architectural characteristics of DPA can be exploited for performance gains.
Following guidelines can significantly improve throughput, e.g., up to 4.3× in key-value aggregation.
Abstract
Network speeds grow quickly in the modern cloud, so SmartNICs are introduced to offload network processing tasks, even application logic. However, typical multicore SmartNICs such as BlueFiled-2 are only capable of processing control-plane tasks with their embedded processors that have limited memory bandwidth and computing power. On the other hand, cloud applications evolve rapidly, such that a limited number of fixed hardware engines in a SmartNIC cannot satisfy the requirements of cloud applications. Therefore, SmartNIC programmers call for a programmable datapath accelerator (DPA) to process network traffic at line rate. However, no existing work has unveiled the performance characteristics of the existing DPA. To this end, we present the first architectural characterization of the latest DPA-enhanced BlueFiled-3 (BF3) SmartNIC. Our evaluation results indicate that BF3's DPA is…
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Taxonomy
TopicsSmart Grid Security and Resilience · Embedded Systems Design Techniques
