Beehive: A Flexible Network Stack for Direct-Attached Accelerators
Katie Lim, Matthew Giordano, Theano Stavrinos, Irene Zhang, Jacob Nelson, Baris Kasikci, Tom Anderson

TL;DR
Beehive is an FPGA-based, modular network stack for direct-attached accelerators that enhances flexibility, diagnostics, and performance, achieving significant latency improvements over traditional CPU-attached solutions.
Contribution
It introduces a flexible, modular FPGA network stack architecture that supports complex network functions and diagnostics, unlike fixed pipelines of existing hardware stacks.
Findings
4x reduction in end-to-end RPC tail latency for Linux UDP clients
Modular design allows easy scaling and extension of network functions
Interoperates with standard Linux TCP/UDP clients
Abstract
Direct-attached accelerators, where application accelerators are directly connected to the datacenter network via a hardware network stack, offer substantial benefits in terms of reduced latency, CPU overhead, and energy use. However, a key challenge is that modern datacenter network stacks are complex, with interleaved protocol layers, network management functions, and virtualization support. To operators, network feature agility, diagnostics, and manageability are often considered just as important as raw performance. By contrast, existing hardware network stacks only support basic protocols and are often difficult to extend since they use fixed processing pipelines. We propose Beehive, a new, open-source FPGA network stack for direct-attached accelerators designed to enable flexible and adaptive construction of complex network functionality in hardware. Application and network…
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Taxonomy
TopicsParticle Detector Development and Performance · CCD and CMOS Imaging Sensors · Radiation Detection and Scintillator Technologies
