Paper Title: FlexTOE: Flexible TCP Offload with Fine-Grained Parallelism

Paper Abstract: FlexTOE is a flexible, yet high-performance TCP offload engine (TOE) to SmartNICs. FlexTOE eliminates almost all host data-path TCP processing and is fully customizable. FlexTOE interoperates well with other TCP stacks, is robust under adverse network conditions, and supports POSIX sockets. FlexTOE focuses on data-path offload of established connections, avoiding complex control logic and packet buffering in the NIC. FlexTOE leverages fine-grained parallelization of the TCP data-path and segment reordering for high perfor- mance on wimpy SmartNIC architecture, while remaining flexible via a modular design. We compare FlexTOE to Linux, the TAS software TCP accelerator, and the Chelsio Terminator TOE. We find that Memcached scales up to 38% better on FlexTOE versus TAS, while saving up to 81% host CPU cycles versus Chelsio. FlexTOE provides competitive performance for RPCs, even with wimpy SmartNICs. FlexTOE cuts 99.99th- percentile RPC RTT by 3.2X and 50% versus Chelsio and TAS, respectively.

Paper Author: Rajath Shashidhara, Graduate Student, University of Washington

Author Bio: Rajath Shashidhara is a Ph.D. student in the UW Computer Systems Lab advised by Prof. Simon Peter. His research is in the design and implementation of scalable, efficient and resilient networked systems.