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When Should The Network Be The Computer?

Published: 13 May 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Researchers have repurposed programmable network devices to place small amounts of application computation in the network, sometimes yielding orders-of-magnitude performance gains. At the same time, effectively using these devices requires careful use of limited resources and managing deployment challenges.
This paper provides a framework for principled use of in-network processing. We provide a set of guidelines for building robust and deployable in-network primives, along with a taxonomy to help identify which applications can benefit from in-network processing and what types of devices they should use.

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cover image ACM Conferences
HotOS '19: Proceedings of the Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems
May 2019
227 pages
ISBN:9781450367271
DOI:10.1145/3317550
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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Published: 13 May 2019

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Author Tags

  1. in-network computation
  2. programmable switches
  3. reconfigurable devices
  4. smart NICs

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  • (2024)A Survey on Architectures, Hardware Acceleration and Challenges for In-Network ComputingACM Transactions on Reconfigurable Technology and Systems10.1145/369951418:1(1-34)Online publication date: 10-Oct-2024
  • (2024)Rethinking the Switch Architecture for Stateful In-network ComputingProceedings of the 23rd ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks10.1145/3696348.3696897(273-281)Online publication date: 18-Nov-2024
  • (2024)POSTER:In-network Model Inference for Distributed Systems via Programmable SwitchesProceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2024 Conference: Posters and Demos10.1145/3672202.3673749(75-77)Online publication date: 4-Aug-2024
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