Breakfast of Champions: Towards Zero-Copy Serialization with NIC Scatter-Gather
Published in Proceedings of the 18th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS XVIII), June 2021.
Abstract
Microsecond I/O will make data serialization a major bottleneck for datacenter applications. Serialization is fundamentally about data movement: serialization libraries coalesce and flatten in-memory data structures into a single transmittable buffer. CPU-based serialization approaches will hit a performance limit due to data movement overheads and be unable to keep up with modern networks.
We observe that widely deployed NICs possess scatter-gather capabilities that can be re-purposed to accelerate serialization's core task of coalescing and flattening in-memory data structures. It is possible to build a completely zero-copy, zero-allocation serialization library with commodity NICs. Doing so introduces many research challenges, including using the hardware capabilities efficiently for a wide variety of non-uniform data structures, making application memory available for zero-copy I/O, and ensuring memory safety.
Paper (643KB)
BibTeX entry
@inproceedings{raghavan21-hotos,
author = "Deepti Raghavan and Philip Levis and Matei Zaharia and Irene Zhang",
title = "{Breakfast of Champions: Towards Zero-Copy Serialization with NIC Scatter-Gather}",
booktitle = "{Proceedings of the 18th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS XVIII)}",
year = {2021},
month = {June}
}