# OSMOSIS: Enabling Multi-Tenancy in Datacenter SmartNICs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.03628 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03628/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 7 Sep 2023.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Accelerating Recommender Model ETL with a Streaming FPGA-GPU Dataflow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12032/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multi-tenancy is essential for unleashing SmartNIC's potential in datacenters. Our systematic analysis in this work shows that existing on-path SmartNICs have resource multiplexing limitations. For example, existing solutions lack multi-tenancy capabilities such as performance isolation and QoS provisioning for compute and IO resources. Compared to standard NIC data paths with a well-defined set of offloaded functions, unpredictable execution times of SmartNIC kernels make conventional approaches for multi-tenancy and QoS insufficient. We fill this gap with OSMOSIS, a SmartNICs resource manager co-design. OSMOSIS extends existing OS mechanisms to enable dynamic hardware resource multiplexing of the on-path packet processing data plane. We integrate OSMOSIS within an open-source RISC-V-based 400Gbit/s SmartNIC. Our performance results demonstrate that OSMOSIS fully supports multi-tenancy and enables broader adoption of SmartNICs in datacenters with low overhead.