research-article

Modeling NICs with Unicorn

Authors:

Antoine Kaufmann,

Kornilios Kourtis,

Timothy RoscoeAuthors Info & Claims

PLOS '13: Proceedings of the Seventh Workshop on Programming Languages and Operating Systems

Article No.: 3, Pages 1 - 6

https://doi.org/10.1145/2525528.2525532

Published: 03 November 2013 Publication History

Abstract

NICs are increasingly complex and diverse, offering a wide range of hardware functionality to aid network protocol processing. Harnessing the power of NIC hardware requires the ability to control and reason about a variety of different feature sets in the network stack. Towards this goal, we propose Unicorn, a language for describing modern NICs. Unicorn offers a simple set of abstractions for modeling both NIC functionality and the state of a protocol stack. To evaluate its expressivity and potential, we present a non-trivial model for the Intel i82599 10GbE NIC, and an algorithm that uses graph embedding to optimize the use of NIC hardware in the network stack.

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Cited By

Behnke IBlumschein CDanicki RWiesner PThamsen LKao O(2023)Towards a real-time IoT: Approaches for incoming packet processing in cyber–physical systemsJournal of Systems Architecture10.1016/j.sysarc.2023.102891140(102891)Online publication date: Jul-2023
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sysarc.2023.102891
Stephens BAkella ASwift MLorch JYu M(2019)LoomProceedings of the 16th USENIX Conference on Networked Systems Design and Implementation10.5555/3323234.3323238(33-46)Online publication date: 26-Feb-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3323234.3323238
Phothilimthana PLiu MKaufmann APeter SBodik RAnderson TArpaci-Dusseau AVoelker G(2018)FloemProceedings of the 13th USENIX conference on Operating Systems Design and Implementation10.5555/3291168.3291217(663-679)Online publication date: 8-Oct-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3291168.3291217
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cover image ACM Conferences

PLOS '13: Proceedings of the Seventh Workshop on Programming Languages and Operating Systems

November 2013

70 pages

ISBN:9781450324601

DOI:10.1145/2525528

Program Chairs:
Tim Harris
Oracle Labs, Cambridge
,
Anil Madhavapeddy
University of Cambridge

Copyright © 2013 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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SIGOPS: ACM Special Interest Group on Operating Systems

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

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Published: 03 November 2013

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Microsoft Research

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SOSP '13

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SIGOPS

SOSP '13: ACM SIGOPS 24th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles

November 3 - 6, 2013

Pennsylvania, Farmington

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PLOS '13 Paper Acceptance Rate 10 of 16 submissions, 63%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 17 of 32 submissions, 53%

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SOSP '25

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ACM SIGOPS 31st Symposium on Operating Systems Principles

October 13 - 16, 2025

Seoul , Republic of Korea

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Cited By

Behnke IBlumschein CDanicki RWiesner PThamsen LKao O(2023)Towards a real-time IoT: Approaches for incoming packet processing in cyber–physical systemsJournal of Systems Architecture10.1016/j.sysarc.2023.102891140(102891)Online publication date: Jul-2023
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sysarc.2023.102891
Stephens BAkella ASwift MLorch JYu M(2019)LoomProceedings of the 16th USENIX Conference on Networked Systems Design and Implementation10.5555/3323234.3323238(33-46)Online publication date: 26-Feb-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3323234.3323238
Phothilimthana PLiu MKaufmann APeter SBodik RAnderson TArpaci-Dusseau AVoelker G(2018)FloemProceedings of the 13th USENIX conference on Operating Systems Design and Implementation10.5555/3291168.3291217(663-679)Online publication date: 8-Oct-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3291168.3291217
Stephens BAkella ASwift M(2018)Your Programmable NIC Should be a Programmable SwitchProceedings of the 17th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks10.1145/3286062.3286068(36-42)Online publication date: 15-Nov-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3286062.3286068

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