Awesome SmartNIC

Papers

• Tai Chi: A General High-Efficiency Scheduling Framework for SmartNICs in Hyperscale Clouds. Bang Di, et.al. SOSP, 2025 [Paper]
• SwCC: Software-Programmable and Per-Packet Congestion Control in RDMA Engine. Hongjing Huang, Jie Zhang, et.al. ATC, 2025 [Paper]
• Portable and High-Performance SmartNIC Programs with Alkali. Jiaxin Lin, Zhiyuan Guo, et.al. NSDI, 2025. [Paper] [Code]
• RpcNIC: Enabling Efficient Datacenter RPC Offloading on PCIe-attached SmartNICs. Jie Zhang, Hongjing Huang, et.al. HPCA, 2025 [Paper]
• LuWu: An End-to-End In-Network Out-of-Core Optimizer for 100B-Scale Model-in-Network Data-Parallel Training on Distributed GPUs. Mo Sun, Zihan Yang, Changyue Liao, et.al. Preprint, 2024. [Paper]
• Network-Offloaded Bandwidth-Optimal Broadcast and Allgather for Distributed AI. Mikhail Khalilov, et.al. Preprint, 2024. [Paper]
• Burstable Cloud Block Storage with Data Processing Units. Junyi Shu, et.al. OSDI, 2024. [Paper]
• SuperNIC: An FPGA-Based, Cloud-Oriented SmartNIC. Will Lin, Yizhou Shan, et.al. FPGA, 2024. [Paper]
• A Comprehensive Survey on SmartNICs: Architectures, Development Models, Applications, and Research Directions. Elie Kfoury, et.al. Preprint, 2024. [Paper]
• FPGA-based SmartNIC for Distributed Machine Learning. Hongyu He. ETH Master Thesis, 2024. [Link]
• Demystifying Datapath Accelerator Enhanced Off-path SmartNIC. Xuzheng Chen, Jie Zhang, et.al. ICNP, 2024 [Paper]
• HAL: Hardware-assisted Load Balancing for Energy-efficient SNIC-Host Cooperative Computing. Jinghan Huang, et.al ISCA, 2024 [Paper]
• LogNIC: A High-Level Performance Model for SmartNICs. Zerui Guo, et.al., MICRO, 2023 [Paper]
• Software-Hardware Co-design of Heterogeneous SmartNIC System for Recommendation Models Inference and Training. Anqi Guo, et.al. ICS, 2023 [Paper]
• Lightning: A Reconfigurable Photonic-Electronic SmartNIC for Fast and Energy-Efficient Inference. Zhizhen Zhong, et.al. SIGCOMM, 2023 [Paper] [Code]
• LEED: A Low-Power, Fast Persistent Key-Value Store on SmartNIC JBOFs. Zerui Guo, et.al., SIGCOMM, 2023 [Paper]
• Unleashing SmartNIC Packet Processing Performance in P4. Jiarong Xing, et.al. SIGCOMM, 2023 [Paper], [Code]
• STYX: Exploiting SmartNIC Capability to Reduce Datacenter Memory Tax. Houxiang Ji, et.al. ATC, 2023 [Paper]
• Characterizing Off-path SmartNIC for Accelerating Distributed Systems. Xingda Wei, et.al. OSDI, 2023 [Paper], [Code]
• SmartDS: Middle-Tier-centric SmartNIC Enabling Application-aware Message Split for Disaggregated Block Storage. Jie Zhang, et.al. ISCA, 2023 [Paper]
• Towards Accelerating Data Intensive Application's Shuffle Process Using SmartNICs. Jiaxin Lin, et.al. SIGMETRICS, 2023 [Paper]
• Rearchitecting the TCP Stack for I/O-Offloaded Content Delivery. Taehyun Kim, et.al. NSDI, 2023 [Paper]
• RingLeader: Efficiently Offloading Intra-Server Orchestration to NICs. Jiaxin Lin, et.al. NSDI, 2023 [Paper], [Code]
• OXDP: Offloading XDP to SmartNIC for Accelerating Packet Processing. Feng Wang, et.al. ICPADS, 2023 [Paper]
• Adaptive SmartNIC Offloading for Unleashing the Performance of Protocol-Oblivious Forwarding. Qian Zhang, et.al. IOT, 2023. [Paper]
• A Framework for Neural Network Inference on FPGA-Centric SmartNICs. Anqi Guo, et.al. FPL, 2022 [Paper]
• Towards portable end-to-end network performance characterization of SmartNICs. Tong Xing, et.al. APSys, 2022 [Paper]
• AlNiCo: SmartNIC-accelerated Contention-aware Request Scheduling for Transaction Processing. Junru Li, et.al. ATC, 2022 [Paper]
• FpgaNIC: An FPGA-based Versatile 100Gb SmartNIC for GPUs. Zeke Wang, et.al. ATC, 2022 [Paper] [Code]
• Faster Software Packet Processing on FPGA NICs with eBPF Program Warping. Marco Bonola, et.al. ATC, 2022 [Paper]
• FlexTOE: Flexible TCP Offload with Fine-Grained Parallelism. Rajath Shashidhara, et.al. NSDI, 2022 [Paper] [Code]
• Re-architecting Traffic Analysis with Neural Network Interface Cards. Giuseppe Siracusano, et. al. NSDI, 2022 [Paper]
• FPGA-Based AI Smart NICs for Scalable Distributed AI Training Systems. Rui Ma, et.al. IEEE Computer Architecture Letters, 2022 [Paper]
• LineFS: Efficient SmartNIC Offload of a Distributed File System with Pipeline Parallelism. Jongyul Kim, et.al. SOSP, 2021 [Paper] [Code]
• Automated SmartNIC Offloading Insights for Network Functions.Yiming Qiu, et.al. SOSP, 2021 [Paper]
• Xenic: SmartNIC-Accelerated Distributed Transactions. Jongyul Kim, et.al. SOSP, 2021 [Paper]

• Gimbal: Enabling Multi-tenant Storage Disaggregation on SmartNIC JBOFs. Jaehong Min, et.al. SIGCOMM, 2021 [Paper]
• The nanoPU: A Nanosecond Network Stack for Datacenters. Stephen Ibanez, et.al. OSDI, 2021 [Paper] [Slide]
• Enabling Compute-Communication Overlap in Distributed Training Platforms. Saeed Rashidi, et.al. ISCA, 2021 [Paper]
• Autonomous NIC offload. Boris Pismenny, et.al. ASPLOS, 2021 [Paper]
• The Programmable Data Plane: Abstractions, Architectures, Algorithms, and Applications. Oliver Michel, et.al. ACM Computing Surveys, 2021 [Paper]
• hXDP: Efficient Software Packet Processing on FPGA NICs. Marco Spaziani Brunella, et.al. OSDI, 2020 [Paper] [Slide] [Code]
• PANIC: A High-Performance Programmable NIC for Multi-tenant Networks. Jiaxin Lin, et. al. OSDI, 2020 [Paper] [Slide] [Code] [Code_cocotb_version]
• Clara: Performance Clarity for SmartNIC Offloading. Yiming Qiu, et.al. HotNets, 2020 [Paper]
• SmartNIC Performance Isolation with FairNIC: Programmable Networking for the Cloud. Stewart Grant, et.al. SIGCOMM, 2020 [Paper]
• A Case for SmartNIC-accelerated Private Communication. Duckwoo Kim, et.al. APNet, 2020 [Paper]
• Corundum: An Open-Source 100-Gbps NIC. Alex Forencich, et.al. FCCM, 2020 [Paper] [Slide] [Code]
• Lynx: A SmartNIC-driven Accelerator-centric Architecture for Network Servers. Maroun Tork, et.al. ASPLOS, 2020 [Paper] [Slide] [Code]
• LeapIO: Efficient and Portable Virtual NVMe Storage on ARM SoCs. Huaicheng Li, et.al. ASPLOS, 2020 [Paper]
• AccelTCP: Accelerating Network Applications with Stateful TCP Offloading. YoungGyoun Moon, et.al. NSDI, 2020 [Paper]
• iPipe: A Framework for Building Distributed Applications on SmartNICs. Ming Liu, et.al. SIGCOMM, 2019 [Paper] [Slide]
• E3: Energy-Efficient Microservices on SmartNIC-Accelerated Servers. Ming Liu, et.al. USENIX ATC, 2019 [Paper]
• NICA: An Infrastructure for Inline Acceleration of Network Applications. Haggai Eran, et.al. USENIX ATC, 2019 [Paper] [Code]
• UniSec: a unified security framework with SmartNIC acceleration in public cloud. Jinli Yan, et.al. TURC, 2019
• Loom: Flexible and Efficient NIC Packet Scheduling. Brent Stephens, et.al. NSDI, 2019 [Paper]
• Floem: A Programming System for NIC-Accelerated Network Applications. Phitchaya Mangpo Phothilimthana, et.al. OSDI, 2018 [Paper] [Slide] [Code]
• Your Programmable NIC Should be a Programmable Switch. Brent Stephens, et.al. HotNets, 2018 [Paper]
• INCEPTIONN: A Network-Centric Hardware/Algorithm Co-Design to Accelerate Distributed Training of Deep Neural Networks. Youjie Li, et. al. MICRO 2018 [Paper] [Slide]
• Accelerating Flow Processing Middleboxes with Programmable NICs. YoungGyoun Moon, et.al. ACM APSys, 2018 [Paper]
• Towards Converged SmartNIC Architecture for Bare Metal and Public Clouds at Tencent Scale. Layong Luo. APNet, 2018 [Slide]
• Beyond SmartNICs: Towards a Fully Programmable Cloud (Invited Paper). Adrian Caulfield, et.al. HPSR, 2018 [Paper]
• Azure Accelerated Networking: SmartNICs in the Public Cloud. Daniel Firestone, et.al. NSDI, 2018 [Paper]
• UNO: unifying host and smart NIC offload for flexible packet processing. Yanfang Le, et.al. SoCC 2017 [Paper]
• KV-Direct: High-Performance In-Memory Key-Value Store with Programmable NIC. Bojie Li, et.al. SOSP, 2017 [Paper]
• IncBricks: Toward InNetwork Computation with an In-Network Cache. Ming Liu, et.al. ASPLOS, 2017 [Paper]
• ClickNP: Highly Flexible and High Performance Network Processing with Reconfigurable Hardware. Bojie Li, et.al. SIGCOMM, 2016 [Paper]
• High Performance Packet Processing with FlexNIC. Antoine Kaufmann, et.al. ASPLOS, 2016 [Paper] [Slide]
• FlexNIC: Rethinking Network DMA. Antoine Kaufmann, et.al. HotOS, 2015 [Paper] [Slide]
• Security Offload Using the SmartNIC, A Programmable 10 Gbps Ethernet NIC. Gerald Sabin, et.al. NAECON, 2015 [Paper]

Reports

• Performance Characteristics of the BlueField-2 SmartNIC. Jianshen Liu, et.al. Preprint, 2021[Paper]

• Cisco Nexus SmartNIC. Cisco. 2021 [Website]

• InnovaTM-2 Flex Open Programmable SmartNIC. Mellanox. 2020 [Datasheet]

• Investigating Scientific Workload Acceleration using BlueField SmartNICs. Brody Williams, et.al. OSTI.GOV/Technical Report, 2020 [Report]

• Fungible Ups Data-Center Efficiency. Bob Wheeler, The Linley Group, 2020

• Mellanox Right-Sizes Smart-NIC SoC. Bob Wheeler, The Linley Group, 2019

• Pensando, Xilinx Debut Smart NICs. Bob Wheeler, The Linley Group, 2020

• Exploring Mellanox Bluefield SmartNICs as Accelerators for Heterogeneous Architectures. Brody Williams, et.al. OSTI.GOV/Technical Report, 2019 [Report]

• How to Design SmartNICs Using FPGAs to Increase Server Compute Capacity. Achronix, 2019 [Website]

Projects

• Hellosnic: An elementary-level smartnic example, with fpga-based integrated structure. [Code]
• OpenSNAPI: Toward a Unified API for SmartNICs [Website] [Report]
• OpenNIC: An FPGA-based NIC platform for the open source community. Xilinx. [Website] [Related Projects: open-nic-shell, driver] [Video]
• ESnet SmartNIC hardware design repository. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. [Code]

Blogs

• SmartNICs in the Cloud: The Why, What, and How of In-network Processing for Data-Intensive Applications. Faeze Faghih, et.al , SIGMOD Tutorials, 2024

• NVIDIA Mellanox Bluefield-2 SmartNIC Hands-On Tutorial. Levente Csikor, [Part I], [Part II], [Part III], [Part IV], [Part V], [Part VI], [Part VII/A], [Part VII/B]

• 网络的智能应该放在哪里：网卡、交换机还是 xPU？ 李博杰，知乎 [Website]

• 打造高性能 IaaS 计算架构，百度智能云 DPU 落地实践. [Website]

• What Is a SmartNIC? Kevin Deierling, Mellanox Blog, 2018 [Website ]

• The new life of SmartNICs. Mark Silberstein, ACM SIGARCH, 2018 [Website]

• 如何评价微软在数据中心使用 FPGA 代替传统 CPU 的做法？李博杰，知乎 [Website]

• SmartNIC那些事. 唐杰账号（微信公众号）[Websit 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10] [Video]

• SmartNICs and SmartSSDs, the Future of Smart Acceleration, Scott Schweitzer, SNIA SDC, 2020 [Website&Slide]

• Have SmartNIC – Will Compute, Scott Schweitzer, ElectronicDesign, 2020-2021[Website]

• https://wiki.libvirt.org/page/Virtio

Patents

• REMOTE SMART NIC - BASED SERVICE ACCELERATION. US Patent. US 20200278892A1