Efficient Distributed File System Offloading on SmartNIC

Modern NIC hardware with programmable capabilities (SmartNIC, SNIC) offers opportunities to offload high-performance distributed file systems (DFS) to the NIC for further acceleration. However, existing designs overlook hardware features and offload all DFS operations to the SNIC, leading to underutilization (18.2%) of SNIC hardware. In this paper, we conduct a systematic study of its inefficiency and identify three non-optimal design and implementation decisions. To address these issues, we propose three improved designs and combine them into S-DFS—an efficient SNIC-offloaded DFS. Compared to the state-of-the-art system, LineFS, S-DFS is 3.18× faster and can fully utilize the power of SNIC.