Inference-to-complete: A High-performance and Programmable Data-plane Co-processor for Neural-network-driven Traffic Analysis

Neural-networks-driven intelligent data-plane (NN-driven IDP) is becoming an emerging topic for excellent accuracy and high performance. Meanwhile we argue that NN-driven IDP should satisfy three design goals: the flexibility to support various NNs models, the low-latency-high-throughput inference performance, and the data-plane-unawareness harming no performance and functionality. Unfortunately, existing work either over-modify NNs for IDP, or insert inline pipelined accelerators into the data-plane, failing to meet the flexibility and unawareness goals. In this paper, we propose Kaleidoscope, a flexible and high-performance co-processor located at the bypass of the data-plane. To address the challenge of meeting three design goals, three key techniques are presented. The programmable run-to-completion accelerators are developed for flexible inference. To further improve performance, we design a scalable inference engine which completes low-latency and low-cost inference for the mouse flows, and perform complex NNs with high-accuracy for the elephant flows. Finally, raw-bytes-based NNs are introduced, which help to achieve unawareness. We prototype Kaleidoscope on both FPGA and ASIC library. In evaluation on six NNs models, Kaleidoscope reaches 256-352 ns inference latency and 100 Gbps throughput with negligible influence on the data-plane. The on-board tested NNs perform state-of-the-art accuracy among other NN-driven IDP, exhibiting the the significant impact of flexibility on enhancing traffic analysis accuracy.