SCENIC: Stream Computation-Enhanced SmartNIC
Benjamin Ramhorst, Maximilian Jakob Heer, Luhao Liu, Heejae Kim, Jonas Dann, Jin-Soo Kim, Gustavo Alonso

TL;DR
SCENIC is an open-source SmartNIC that treats the NIC datapath as a stream computation platform, enabling high-performance, customizable network processing integrated with existing datacenter infrastructure.
Contribution
The paper introduces SCENIC, a novel SmartNIC design that combines high bandwidth, programmability, and integration with Linux, bridging the gap between commercial and research SmartNICs.
Findings
SCENIC achieves 200G network throughput with integrated TCP/IP and RDMA stacks.
It supports flexible data processing with on-datapath Stream Compute Units (SCUs).
Performance matches commercial SmartNICs and enables diverse use cases.
Abstract
Although modern, AI-centric datacenters heavily rely on SmartNICs, existing devices impose a hard trade-off. Commercial SmartNICs provide high bandwidth and easy software integration, but offer limited support for customization and data processing offload. In contrast, research SmartNICs often suffer from low bandwidth, limited functionality, and poor software compatibility -- to the point that many are not actual NICs in a technical sense. This gap can be closed by treating the NIC datapath as a first-class stream computation substrate with shared hardware/software abstractions for a tight co-design of infrastructure and applications. To demonstrate this, we introduce SCENIC, an open-source datacenter SmartNIC. SCENIC implements a 200G network datapath over offloaded TCP/IP and RDMA stacks, as well as a fallback path for processing arbitrary network traffic. On top of the network…
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