AlNiCo: SmartNIC-accelerated Contention-aware Request Scheduling for Transaction Processing

High-performance transaction processing needs to schedule numerous requests from the network. However, such request scheduling comes with costs of complex information gathering and considerable computation. We observe that emerging SmartNICs pose opportunities for transaction scheduling with low overhead. In this paper, we propose Al-NiCo, which leverages SmartNICs to intelligently schedule incoming transaction requests to CPU cores, minimizing intertransaction contention with low latency. AlNiCo describes the contention according to system states in a way that Smart-NICs can efficiently process, and co-designs hardware and software to enable flexible and adaptive scheduling. We implement AlNiCo using FPGA-equipped Innova-2 SmartNICs, and our evaluation shows that AlNiCo boosts the throughput by 1.30× ∼ 2.68× and reduces the latency by up to 48.8%.