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

Explore a groundbreaking programmable Network Interface Card (NIC) design called PANIC in this 20-minute conference talk from OSDI '20. Dive into the challenges of supporting multiple diverse offloads while maintaining high performance, multi-tenant isolation, and flexible offload chaining in modern NICs. Learn about Frenzy, a novel NIC architecture that introduces a high-performance switching interconnect and a hybrid push/pull packet scheduler to overcome existing limitations. Discover how PANIC achieves scalable offload chaining, cross-tenant performance isolation, and low-latency load-balancing across parallel offload engines. Examine the results from experiments conducted on a 100Gbps FPGA-based prototype and through simulations, demonstrating how this innovative design surpasses the capabilities of state-of-the-art programmable NICs.

Intro
Smart NIC and Multi Tenancy
Requirements # 2 Flexible Chaining • Flexible Chaining
Requirements #3 Isolation
Outline
Existing NIC Design Overview
Pipeline Design NIC
Manycore NIC
PANIC Design Overview
Life-Cycle of a Packet in PANIC
RMT Pipeline
Problem: Chaining and Load Balancing Goal #1: Achieve high-performance chaining
PANIC Scheduler: Prioritized Dropping
Compute Unit
Switching Fabric
PANIC Implementation
PANIC Evaluation
Conclusion