智能网卡综述

Survey on Smart Network Interface Card

在网速飞速提升、内存瓶颈突出、网络处理开销愈发显著的时代,普通网卡在网络协议处理、数据搬移、使用灵活性等方面逐渐暴露出缺陷.智能网卡,作为可编程的智能网络设备,在数据中心、科学计算领域均得到广泛关注,成为解决网络瓶颈的关键技术.在网络协议处理卸载、网络功能虚拟化、特定应用加速等应用场景中发挥着重要作用.综述从智能网卡的基础架构、编程框架、应用方向和热点问题4个方面进行分析,总结了目前产业界中的典型产品、学术界中的重要成果,明确了不同设计架构的优势和不足,分析了不同编程框架适用的应用场景,介绍了智能网卡在典型数据中心应用、科学计算应用实例中的作用,对不同应用场景中智能网卡的软硬件协同设计提供了建议.最后,综述对当前智能网卡设计、使用中仍然存在的热点问题进行总结,总结了通用的智能网卡设计思路,指明未来有价值的重要研究点.

In the era of the rapid increase in network speed,memory access bottleneck has been a prominent problem,and network processing overhead has been increasing significantly.Ordinary network cards have gradually exposed defects in network protocol processing,data migration,and programmable flexibility in modern applications.As a programmable intelligent network device,the SmartNIC(smart network interface card)has received extensive attention in the fields of data center and scientific computing cluster applications.SmartNIC has become a key technology to solve network bottlenecks.It can bring significant benefits in terms of protocol processing offload,network function virtualization,application-specific acceleration,and other usage scenarios.We survey the basic architecture,programming framework,application direction,and other hot research issues of SmartNIC.We summarize the typical products in the current industry and important achievements in academia.We also clarify the advantages and disadvantages of different design architectures.The application scenarios applicable to different programming frameworks are introduced,and the value of SmartNIC in typical data center applications and scientific computing applications is introduced.After that,we give some efficient suggestions about software and hardware collaborative design of SmartNIC in different application scenarios.Finally,we present the hot issues that still exist in the design and use of SmartNIC,and put forward the important future research points and a universal design solution for SmartNIC.