NetCL: A Unified Programming Framework for In-Network Computing

The emergence of programmable data planes (PDPs) has paved the way for in-network computing (INC), a paradigm wherein networking devices actively participate in distributed computations. However, PDPs are still a niche technology, mostly available to network operators, and rely on packet-processing...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:SC24: International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis pp. 1 - 20
Main Authors: Karlos, George, Bal, Henri, Wang, Lin
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Published: IEEE 17.11.2024
Subjects:
Codes
Compilers
Computational modeling
Distributed computing
Distributed databases
DSL
High performance computing
In-network computing
Kernel
Libraries
Program processors
Programmable data plane
Programming
Programming languages
Runtime
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:The emergence of programmable data planes (PDPs) has paved the way for in-network computing (INC), a paradigm wherein networking devices actively participate in distributed computations. However, PDPs are still a niche technology, mostly available to network operators, and rely on packet-processing DSLs like P4. This necessitates great networking expertise from INC programmers to articulate computational tasks in networking terms and reason about their code. To lift this barrier to INC we propose a unified compute interface for the data plane. We introduce \mathrm{C} / \mathrm{C}++ extensions that allow INC to be expressed as kernel functions processing in-flight messages, and APIs for establishing INC-aware communication. We develop a compiler that translates kernels into P4, and thin runtimes that handle the required network plumbing, shielding INC programmers from low-level networking details. We evaluate our system using common INC applications from the literature.
DOI:10.1109/SC41406.2024.00051