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Enable virtualized smart NICs with multi-tenancy without compromising QoS or security

Develop and evaluate mechanisms in data-center operating systems and smart network interface cards (sNICs) that enable virtualized sNICs to provide multi-tenancy while preserving quality-of-service and security guarantees.

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Background

FPsPIN aims to provide a general, vendor-agnostic platform for exploring in-network compute offload using the sPIN model. Beyond performance questions, deploying sNIC capabilities in multi-tenant data centers requires careful integration with operating systems to maintain isolation and service guarantees.

The authors explicitly highlight an open question about augmenting data-center OSes and sNICs to support virtualized smart NICs, ensuring multi-tenancy without violating QoS or security—an area that remains underexplored and is critical for broader adoption.

References

We believe FPsPIN is capable of enabling the HPC and datacenter community to answer open research questions such as which parts of the HPC software stack can benefit from NIC offload in practice, or how can we augment data-center operating systems and sNICs to enable virtualized sNICs and thereby providing multi-tenancy, without breaking quality of service and security guarantees.

— FPsPIN: An FPGA-based Open-Hardware Research Platform for Processing in the Network (2405.16378 - Schneider et al., 25 May 2024) in Conclusion