OS4C: An Open-Source SR-IOV System for SmartNIC-Based Cloud Platforms

Scott Smith, Yuan Ma, Marissa Lanz, Bill Dai, Martin Ohmacht, Bharat Sukhwani, Hubertus Franke, Volodymyr Kindratenko, Deming Chen

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Smart network interface cards (SmartNICs) are programmable network cards that enable the flexible offloading of network- and application-level functionality. The last several years have seen a significant rise in research related to smart, programmable NICs. Meanwhile, several open-source FPGA-based NIC and networking projects have emerged. However, these projects lack many key features necessary for strong performance in cloud settings. We identify Single Root In-put/Output Virtualization (SR-IOV) as one of the key missing features in these open-source implementations. SR-IOV enables cloud vendors to grant cloud tenants direct access to hardware resources, dramatically reducing the software overheads of device virtualization. We present OS4C, which extends the popular open-source NIC Corundum [1] with support for SR-IOV. We demonstrate that OS4C can improve virtual machine P99.9 network tail latency by up to 17x, throughput by up to 4x, and CPU effort by up to 3.9x compared to software virtualization. On top of this system, we provide a novel weighted round-robin scheduler that enables tenants and providers to control weight distributions and overhaul the Corundum simulation framework to support multi-tenant tests and performance insights.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings - 2024 IEEE 17th International Conference on Cloud Computing, CLOUD 2024
EditorsRong N. Chang, Carl K. Chang, Jingwei Yang, Nimanthi Atukorala, Zhi Jin, Michael Sheng, Jing Fan, Kenneth Fletcher, Qiang He, Tevfik Kosar, Santonu Sarkar, Sreekrishnan Venkateswaran, Shangguang Wang, Xuanzhe Liu, Seetharami Seelam, Chandra Narayanaswami, Ziliang Zong
PublisherIEEE Computer Society
Pages365-375
Number of pages11
ISBN (Electronic)9798350368536
DOIs
StatePublished - 2024
Externally publishedYes
Event17th IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing, CLOUD 2024 - Shenzhen, China
Duration: Jul 7 2024Jul 13 2024

Publication series

NameIEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing, CLOUD
ISSN (Print)2159-6182
ISSN (Electronic)2159-6190

Conference

Conference17th IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing, CLOUD 2024
Country/TerritoryChina
CityShenzhen
Period7/7/247/13/24

Keywords

  • Cloud Networking
  • Device Vir-tualization
  • FPGAs
  • Network Virtualization
  • Open-Source
  • SmartNIC

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Information Systems
  • Software

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