Accelerators are everywhere in computer systems research today, and in this context, it is easy to see “smart” Network Interface Cards—which embed some programmable compute power in the network interface of the server—as simply another chapter in this story.
In this talk, I am going to discuss how SmartNICs do more than simply “accelerate” network-intensive computing. Instead, I argue that SmartNICs radically re-orient the control of data movement within the server in a way that is necessary for server hardware to scale with the deluge of network traffic in data centers. I will illustrate a few exemplary systems—the Pigasus IDS, the Ensō NIC protocol, and the KOPI OS architecture—from my own research group, as well as exciting work in other labs all of which re-orient server data movement using programmable NICs.
Justine Sherry,
Carnegie Mellon University
Justine Sherry is the A. Nico Habermann Associate Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Her interests are in software and hardware networked systems at all layers. Much of her research focuses on middleboxes and network functions, specialized devices that secure Internet connections and make data load more efficiently.
Together with her colleagues, she developed APLOMB, the first system to apply cloud computing principles to network functions; BlindBox, the first middlebox to scan the contents of encrypted traffic without decrypting it; and Pigasus, the first open-source intrusion detection system to operate over 100Gbps of data with a single server.
Dr. Sherry has received numerous awards including an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, the VMWare Systems Award, an IETF Applied Networking Research Prize, and the SIGCOMM Doctoral Dissertation Award. She is a member of the ACM CoNEXT Steering Committee, the DARPA ISAT Study Group, and the SIGCOMM CARES Committee. Finally, she is always on the lookout for a great cappuccino.