NutCracker: A Compilation Framework for Hybrid DPU Architectures

SoC-based SmartNICs, or data processing units (DPUs), are becoming a viable option for offloading infrastructure services. However, developers need deep hardware-level knowledge to fully utilize the available hardware accelerators on a target DPU. Hardware heterogeneity also makes porting across DPUs a formidable task. In this work, we propose a new compiler framework, NutCracker. Using NutCracker, programmers develop DPU applications using high-level target-independent languages. NutCracker applies a two-stage compilation process. It first performs progressive lowering to convert the source program to candidate intermediate representations (IRs) of the target DPU. Next, NutCracker applies cost-guided mapping optimization using equality saturation to select a final implementation on the target hardware with a configurable optimization goal. Evaluated on eight applications, NutCracker reduces developer effort by nearly 90% while delivering performance within 3% of handcrafted implementations for seven of the workloads. Moreover, its compilation time is comparable to standard toolchains such as GCC.