SPMA'20 Keynote: Dan Ports on Accelerating Distributed Systems with In-Network Computation
Channel: SPMA Workshop
Date: 2020-04-29

Prof. Dan Ports, Microsoft Research
Accelerating Distributed Systems with In-Network Computation

Recent advances in accelerators have yielded major improvements in single-node performance, but distributed systems performance now lags far behind. Can we build a new accelerator for distributed systems and close this gap? In this talk, I'll argue that in-network computation can serve as a distributed systems accelerator. Enabled by new programmable switches and NICs that can place small amounts of computation directly in the network fabric, we can speed up common communication patterns for distributed systems, and reach new levels of performance.

I'll describe three systems that use in-network acceleration to speed up classic communication and coordination challenges. First, I'll show how to speed up state machine replication using a network sequencing primitive. The ordering guarantees it provides  allow us to design a new consensus protocol, Network-Ordered Paxos, with extremely low performance overhead. Second, I'll show that even a traditionally compute-bound workload -- ML training -- is increasingly network-bound. Our new system, SwitchML, alleviates this bottleneck by accelerating a common communication pattern using a programmable switch. Finally, I'll show that using in-network computation to manage the migration and replication of data, in a system called Pegasus, allows us to load-balance a key-value store to achieve high utilization and predictable performance in the face of skewed workloads.

Bio: Dan Ports is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research and Affiliate Assistant Professor in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. Dan's background is in distributed systems research, and more recently he has been focused on how to use new datacenter technologies like programmable networks to build better distributed systems. He leads the Prometheus project at MSR, which uses this co-design approach to build practical high-performance distributed systems. Dan received a Ph.D. from MIT (2012). His research has been recognized with best paper awards at NSDI and OSDI.