Active Network Interface: Opportunities and Challenges

Modern Network Interface Cards (NICs) incorporate programmable processors, DMA channels, and a significant amount of memory on them. Thus, they are becoming faster, smarter, and intelligent and are being designated as “Active Network Interfaces.” Similar to an executive offloading common tasks to his/her secretary, a modern NIC provides flexibility to offload parts of a communication protocol from its host (CPU) to itself. Such flexibility leads to a completely new way of designing communication services (point-to-point communication, collective communication, synchronization, and QoS) for clusters with high performance, scalability, and low CPU utilization. The active NICs also provide opportunities for designing other services (such as firewall, intrusion detection, and load balancing) efficiently for cluster-based servers. In this talk, I will present such opportunities and the associated challenges in depth. Next, I will present results from many projects focusing along this objective. In the end, I will provide a short overview of the emerging InfiniBand architecture which uses active NICs extensively.