Floem: A Programming System for NIC-Accelerated Network Applications

Developing server applications that offload computation and data to a NIC accelerator is laborious because one has to explore the design space of decisions about data placement and caching; partitioning of code and its parallelism; and communication strategies between program components across devices. We propose programming abstractions for NIC-accelerated applications, balancing the ease of developing a correct application and the ability to refactor it to explore different design choices. The design space includes semantic changes as well as variations on parallelization and program-to-resource mapping. Our abstractions include logical and physical queues and a construct for mapping the former onto the latter; global per-packet state; a remote caching construct; and an interface to external application code. We develop Floem, a programming system that provides these abstractions, and show that the system helps explore a space of NIC-offloading designs for real-world applications, including a key-value store and a distributed real-time data analytics system, improving throughput by 1.3--3.6x.