Disaggregating and Consolidating Network Functionalities with SuperNIC

Resource disaggregation has gained huge popularity in recent years. Existing works demonstrate how to disaggregate compute, memory, and storage resources. We, for the first time, demonstrate how to disaggregate network resources by proposing a network resource pool that consists of a new hardware-based network device called SuperNIC. Each SuperNIC consolidates network functionalities from multiple endpoints by fairly sharing limited hardware resources, and it achieves its performance goals by an auto-scaled, highly parallel data plane and a scalable control plane. We prototyped SuperNIC with FPGA and demonstrate its performance and cost benefits with real network functions and customized disaggregated applications.