Salvatore Pontarelli, Axbryd/CNIT; Roberto Bifulco, NEC Laboratories Europe; Marco Bonola, Axbryd/CNIT; Carmelo Cascone, Open Networking Foundation; Marco Spaziani and Valerio Bruschi, CNIT/University of Rome Tor Vergata; Davide Sanvito, Politecnico di Milano; Giuseppe Siracusano, NEC Laboratories Europe; Antonio Capone, Politecnico di Milano; Michio Honda and Felipe Huici, NEC Laboratories Europe; Giuseppe Bianchi, CNIT/University of Rome Tor Vergata
Programmable NICs allow for better scalability to handle growing network workloads, however, providing an expressive, yet simple, abstraction to program stateful network functions in hardware remains a research challenge. We address the problem with FlowBlaze, an open abstraction for building stateful packet processing functions in hardware. The abstraction is based on Extended Finite State Machines and introduces the explicit definition of flow state, allowing FlowBlaze to leverage flow-level parallelism. FlowBlaze is expressive, supporting a wide range of complex network functions, and easy to use, hiding low-level hardware implementation issues from the programmer. Our implementation of FlowBlaze on a NetFPGA SmartNIC achieves very low latency (on the order of a few microseconds), consumes relatively little power, can hold per-flow state for hundreds of thousands of flows and yields speeds of 40 Gb/s, allowing for even higher speeds on newer FPGA models. Both hardware and software implementations of FlowBlaze are publicly available.
NSDI '19 Open Access Sponsored by NetApp
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author = {Salvatore Pontarelli and Roberto Bifulco and Marco Bonola and Carmelo Cascone and Marco Spaziani and Valerio Bruschi and Davide Sanvito and Giuseppe Siracusano and Antonio Capone and Michio Honda and Felipe Huici and Giuseppe Siracusano},
title = {{FlowBlaze}: Stateful Packet Processing in Hardware},
booktitle = {16th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 19)},
year = {2019},
isbn = {978-1-931971-49-2},
address = {Boston, MA},
pages = {531--548},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/nsdi19/presentation/pontarelli},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = feb
}