With the growing performance requirements on networked applications, there is a new trend of offloading stateful network applications to SmartNICs to improve performance and reduce the total cost of ownership. However, offloading stateful network applications is non-trivial due to state operation complexity, state resource consumption, and the complicated relationship between traffic and state. Naively partitioning the program by state or traffic can result in a suboptimal partition plan with higher CPU usage or even packet drops. In this paper, we propose Cora, a compiler and runtime that offloads stateful network applications to SmartNIC-accelerated hosts. Cora compiler introduces an accurate performance model for each SmartNIC and employs an efficient compiling algorithm to search the offloading plan. Cora runtime can monitor traffic dynamics and adapt to minimize CPU usage. Cora is built atop Netronome Agilio and BlueField 2 SmartNICs. Our evaluation shows that for the same throughput target, Cora can propose partition plans saving up to 94.0% CPU cores, 1.9 times more than baseline solutions. Under the same resource constraint, Cora can accelerate network functions by 44.9%-82.3%. Cora runtime can adapt to traffic changes and keep CPU usage low.

本研究针对有状态网络应用的性能需求不断增长的问题，提出了Cora工具。Cora通过引入智能NIC（SmartNIC）加速主机的编译和运行时环境，开发出一种高效的编译算法和适应性运行时监控，可以显著降低CPU使用率，最长可节省94.0%的CPU核心，提升网络功能的性能。该研究对提升网络应用的性能和降低拥有成本具有重要影响。

Cora：利用SmartNIC加速有状态网络应用