IDIO: Network-Driven, Inbound Network Data Orchestration on Server Processors

Mohammad Alian, Siddharth Agarwal, Jongmin Shin, Neel Patel, Yifan Yuan, Daehoon Kim, Ren Wang, Nam Sung Kim

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

9 Scopus citations

Abstract

High-bandwidth network interface cards (NICs), each capable of transferring 100s of Gigabits per second, are making inroads into the servers of next-generation datacenters. Such unprecedented data delivery rates impose immense pressure, especially on the server's memory subsystem, as NICs first transfer network data to DRAM before processing. To alleviate the pressure, the cache hierarchy has evolved, supporting a direct data I/O (DDIO) technology to directly place network data in the last-level cache (LLC). Subsequently, various policies have been explored to manage such LLC and have proven to effectively reduce service latency and memory bandwidth consumption of network applications. However, the more recent evolution of the cache hierarchy decreased the size of LLC per core but significantly increased that of midlevel cache (MLC) with a non-inclusive policy. This calls for a re-examination of the aforementioned DDIO technology and management policies. In this paper, first, we identify three shortcomings of the current static data placement policy placing network data to LLC first and the non-inclusive policy with a commercial server system: (1) ineffectively using large MLC, (2) suffering from high rates of writebacks from MLC to LLC, and (3) breaking the isolation between application and network data enforced by limiting cache ways for DDIO. Second, to tackle the three shortcomings, we propose an intelligent direct I/O (IDIO) technology that extends DDIO to MLC and provides three synergistic mechanisms: (1) self-invalidating I/O buffer, (2) network-driven MLC prefetching, and (3) selective direct DRAM access. Our detailed experiments using a full-system simulator - capable of running modern DPDK userspace network functions while sustaining 100Gbps + network bandwidth - show that IDIO significantly reduces data movement (up to 84% MLC and LLC writeback reduction), provides LLC isolation (up to 22% performance improvement), and improves tail latency (up to 38% reduction in 99th latency) for receive-intensive network applications.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings - 2022 55th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture, MICRO 2022
PublisherIEEE Computer Society
Pages480-493
Number of pages14
ISBN (Electronic)9781665462723
DOIs
StatePublished - 2022
Event55th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture, MICRO 2022 - Chicago, United States
Duration: 1 Oct 20225 Oct 2022

Publication series

NameProceedings of the Annual International Symposium on Microarchitecture, MICRO
Volume2022-October
ISSN (Print)1072-4451

Conference

Conference55th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture, MICRO 2022
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityChicago
Period1/10/225/10/22

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 IEEE.

Keywords

  • DDIO
  • Datacenter Network
  • Non-inclusive Cache

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