Clara: Performance Clarity for SmartNIC Offloading

Abstract

The gap between CPU and networking speeds has motivated the development of SmartNICs for near-network processing. Recent work has shown that many network functions can benefit from SmartNIC offloading, but identifying the best porting strategy requires hand-tuning and workload-specific optimizations. The developer has no easy way to understand the ported performance beforehand We are developing a tool called Clara, whose goal is to provide performance clarity for SmartNIC offloading. Clara can analyze an unported NF in its original form, and predict its performance when ported to a SmartNIC target. This automated workflow enables the developer to easily customize offloading strategies, obtain performance insights, and identify suitable SmartNIC models for her workloads. Clara's key technical roadmap is to emulate a compiler, lowering an unported program to a SmartNIC target logically, without performing code generation. This results in a mapping from core NF logic to SmartNIC hardware resources, and Clara then plugs in NIC parameters to predict the performance for specific workloads. We describe our progress so far, and report initial validation results with Netronome hardware.