Building Distributed Systems Using Programmable Networks

Abstract

The continuing increase of data center network bandwidth, coupled with a slower improvement in CPU performance, has challenged our conventional wisdom regarding data center networks: how to build distributed systems that can keep up with the network speeds and are high-performant and energy-efficient? The recent emergence of a programmable network fabric (PNF) suggests a potential solution. By offloading suitable computations to a PNF device (i.e., SmartNIC, reconfigurable switch, or network accelerator), one can reduce request serving latency, save end-host CPU cores, and enable efficient traffic control. In this dissertation, we present three frameworks for building PNF-enabled distributed systems: (1) IncBricks, an in-network caching fabric built with network accelerators and programmable switches; (2) iPipe, an actor-based framework for offloading distributed applications on SmartNICs; (3) E3, an energy-efficient microservice execution platform for SmartNIC-accelerated servers. This dissertation presents how to make efficient use of in-network heterogeneous computing re- sources by employing new programming abstractions, applying approximation techniques, co- designing with end-host software layers, and designing efficient control-/data-planes. Our prototyped systems using commodity PNF hardware not only show the feasibility of such an approach but also demonstrate that it is an indispensable technique for efficient data center computing.