smdsbz / RedN

Arbitrary offloads for RDMA NICs

RedN is a framework that allows arbitrary offloads to RDMA NICs showcasing that they are, in fact, Turing complete. Our NSDI 2022 paper describes this framework in detail.

To cite us, you can use the following BibTex entry:

@inproceedings {redn,
author = {Waleed Reda and Marco Canini and Dejan Kosti{\'c} and Simon Peter},
title = {{RDMA} is Turing complete, we just did not know it yet!},
booktitle = {19th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 22)},
year = {2022},
address = {Renton, WA},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/nsdi22/presentation/reda},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = apr,
}

Features of RedN:

• Turing complete: Provides RDMA implementations for high-level programming constructs (e.g. if and while statements)
• Fully offloads access to popular data structures on remote servers (e.g. hash tables, linked lists)
• Accelerates Memcached lookup performance (by up to 35x)
• Supports Infiniband and RoCE

Requirements

• Hardware: Mellanox ConnectX-5 / ConnectX-6 NIC
  • Other models that use the mlx5 driver may also be supported (subject to further testing).
• Drivers: MLNX_OFED 4.7-1.0.0.1 installation
  • TODO: We are currently working on supporting other versions.
• Toolchain: GCC compiler (version 4.7+)

RedN quickstart

• Build the project:
  • Go to the root directory and run make.
• Modify the NIC's firmware (warning: use this at your own discretion)
  • cd conf and run ./disable_wqe_checks.sh <device_name>
  • By default the device_name is set to mlx5_1
• Build and run benchmarks:
  • cd bench/micro and then run make. To execute a hash table lookup offload:
  • On the server run ./hash_bench
  • On the client run ./hash_bench <peer_address> <iters>

Contact

Waleed Reda ([e-mail])

License

This software is provided under the terms of the GNU General Public License 2.