JingZhao: A Framework for Rapid NIC Prototyping in the Domain-Specific-Network Era

The network is becoming Domain-Specific, which requires on-demand design of the network protocols, as well as the microarchitecture of the NIC. However, to develop such a NIC is not that easy. Since the scissor gap between network speed and the growth of CPU frequency is expanding, most of the protocols need to be offloaded to hardware. The process of designing, verifying and optimizing a domain-specific NIC usually takes great effort, which hinders the rapid iteration of new protocols and algorithms. In this paper, we propose JingZhao, an open-sourced framework for NIC prototyping, which could be leveraged to rapidly implement a domain-specific NIC. JingZhao provides several building blocks, as well as a full-fledged RDMA NIC, to help rapidly prototype a high-performance NIC. Our evaluation results show that new network functions can be easily integrated into the framework, and achieve line-rate packet processing.