# Characterizing Off-path SmartNIC for Accelerating Distributed Systems

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.07868 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07868/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 15 Dec 2022.

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [ShadowServe: Interference-Free KV Cache Fetching for Distributed Prefix Caching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.16857/) (2025)
- [Accelerating Recommender Model ETL with a Streaming FPGA-GPU Dataflow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12032/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

SmartNICs have recently emerged as an appealing device for accelerating distributed systems. However, there has not been a comprehensive characterization of SmartNICs, and existing designs typically only leverage a single communication path for workload offloading. This paper presents the first holistic study of a representative off-path SmartNIC, specifically the Bluefield-2, from a communication-path perspective. Our experimental study systematically explores the key performance characteristics of communication among the client, on-board SoC, and host, and offers insightful findings and advice for designers. Moreover, we propose the concurrent use of multiple communication paths of a SmartNIC and present a pioneering guideline to expose new optimization opportunities for various distributed systems. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, we conducted case studies on a SmartNIC-based distributed file system (LineFS) and an RDMA-based disaggregated key-value store (DrTM-KV). Our experimental results show improvements of up to 30% and 25% for LineFS and DrTM-KV, respectively.