PerfNA 2022 : ACM SIGMETRICS Workshop on Performance of Host-based Network Applications

With the advancement of highly network-powered paradigms like 5G, Microservices, etc. which are typically deployed as containers/VMs, there is a growing imperative on the host nodes to perform specialized network tasks like monitoring, filtering, tunneling, load-balancing, etc. While traditionally, these tasks were performed using switches and specialized middleboxes in the network, there is a demand to perform these network tasks on commodity hardware comprising of COTS servers. However, a major challenge is to perform these tasks at low-overhead and high reliability while maintaining low latency, high throughput, and flexibility.

Recently, there are several approaches from academia and industry for building such high-performance network applications. The proposed solutions are built on different high-speed packet processing targets such as DPDK (Data Plane Development Toolkit), eBPF(Extended Berkeley Packet Filter), P4-based smart NICs, DPUs, IPUs, OVS, RDMA, FPGA, etc, each has its own compiler toolchain, accelerators, and programming interface for developers. Some prior work also leverages these solutions for optimizing the TCP stack which benefits these applications deployed on COTS servers.

This workshop is focused on understanding the performance aspects of network applications built over such tools and targets. With several heterogeneous approaches available at the hosts, there is a need for dedicated discussions in this area to understand the pros/cons of using different approaches to solve different network issues, and how these different approaches can converge into a unified framework at the host. We hope this workshop could serve as a catalyst to initiate discussion both among industry and academia on how host-based tools can be leveraged to solve complex network issues and encourage its wide adaptability.

Topics of interest include but not limited to :

Network Stack Performance
Network observability (Monitoring & Debugging)
Protocol acceleration
Application acceleration
Transport-layer acceleration
Modularization of network processing
Performance Benchmarking
Optimizing performance of Network Applications
Improving Performance using Network Programmability
Compiler optimizations for various network targets
Offload across targets
Resource management for network applications
Security for network applications
Trade-off between performance and security

Submission Instructions
Submissions must be original, unpublished work, and not under consideration at another conference or journal. We encourage early-stage works, position/experience papers for early feedback. Submitted papers must be at most six (6) pages long, excluding references and appendices, in two-column 10pt ACM format.

Please submit your paper via https://perfna22.hotcrp.com

Accepted papers will be posted online prior to the workshop and will be published in ACM Digital Library. Since the workshop is conducted in hybrid mode, the authors have an option to present in-person/online.

We also invite "early work-in-progress" pagers upto 3-pages. The format is same as that of the 6-page version. The accepted "3-page" papers will be posted online for open-access.

Important Dates
Submission deadline : April 29th, 2022, 11:59PM AoE (Anywhere on Earth)
Acceptance Notification : May 16th, 2022
Camera-ready deadline : May 26th, 2022
Workshop day : June 6th, 2022

Organizing Committee
Pravein Govindan Kannan, IBM Research
Priyanka Naik, IBM Research
Praveen Tammana, IIT Hyderabad
Mythili Vutukuru, IIT Bombay