PANIC: A High-Performance Programmable NIC for Multi-tenant Networks

Programmable NICs have diverse uses, and there is a need for a NIC platform that can offload computation from multiple co-resident applications to many different types of substrates, including hardware accelerators, embedded FPGAs, and embedded processor cores. Unfortunately, there is no existing NIC design that can simultaneously support a large number of diverse offloads while ensuring high throughput/low latency, multi-tenant isolation, flexible offload chaining, and support for offloads with variable performance.

This paper presents PANIC, a new programmable NIC. There are two new key components of the PANIC design that enable it to overcome the limitations of existing NICs: 1) A high-performance switching interconnect that scalably connects independent engines into offload chains, and 2) A new hybrid push/pull packet scheduler that provides cross-tenant performance isolation and low-latency load-balancing across parallel offload engines. From experiments performed on an 100 Gbps FPGA-based prototype, we find that this design overcomes the limitations of state-of-the-art programmable NICs.