Theme 3: Fine-grained Communication and Coordination

The trend to design data centers with millions of accelerators, supporting a wide variety of heterogeneous functionality will quickly accelerate, introducing networking challenges. We envision hierarchical, flexible and reconfigurable network topologies that leverage accelerators for protocol and infrastructure tasks. This evolvable hardware will be matched with an evolvable communication software stack that specializes to the accelerators available—substantially reducing the Datacenter Tax. Furthermore, to prevent accelerators from sitting idle because the scheduler fails to assign them work or because they are waiting for remote data to arrive, we envision a novel runtime. The runtime bundles computation in small buckets and ships them to where the data lives. Moreover, accelerators in network switches and smartNICs  use their unique vantage points to perform a variety of computations, further improving efficiency. Finally, we propose new memory and accelerator designs to speed-up geo-distributed data stores---since they are a fundamental component of the cloud infrastructure.

Papers and Presentations: