Unlocking the power of inline {Floating-Point} operations on programmable switches

Y Yuan, O Alama, J Fei, J Nelson, DRK Ports… - … USENIX Symposium on …, 2022 - usenix.org
19th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 22), 2022usenix.org
The advent of switches with programmable dataplanes has enabled the rapid development
of new network functionality, as well as providing a platform for acceleration of a broad
range of application-level functionality. However, existing switch hardware was not designed
with application acceleration in mind, and thus applications requiring operations or
datatypes not used in traditional network protocols must resort to expensive workarounds.
Applications involving floating point data, including distributed training for machine learning …
Abstract
The advent of switches with programmable dataplanes has enabled the rapid development of new network functionality, as well as providing a platform for acceleration of a broad range of application-level functionality. However, existing switch hardware was not designed with application acceleration in mind, and thus applications requiring operations or datatypes not used in traditional network protocols must resort to expensive workarounds. Applications involving floating point data, including distributed training for machine learning and distributed query processing, are key examples.
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