Palos: Fair and Flexible Flow Scheduling on RNIC

In recent years, Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) has gained significant attraction within modern hyperscale data centers. However, RNIC fails to provide fine-grained performance isolation among network flows with different traffic patterns which co-exist in multi-tenant data centers and typically have various bandwidth, throughput and latency requirements.In this paper, we reveal that the drawbacks on isolation root in the packet-level flow scheduling mechanism implemented in the RNIC hardware. To solve this problem, we introduce Palos, a fair and flexible flow-scheduling mechanism. In the hardware layer, Palos adopts a data chunk based scheduling mechanism by reconstructing communication descriptors. The data chunk based scheduling diminishes the performance interference between large flows and small flows. Palos configures the scheduler in the software layer using a hierarchical weight setting to enable customized performance policy while preventing the configuration of users from interfering each other. Our experiments demonstrate that Palos provides better performance isolation and performance control flexibility compared with the commodity RDMA NIC and existing optimization framework.