Analyzing Energy Efficiency of a Server with a SmartNIC under SLO Constraints

Network processing has become a fast-increasing portion of the datacenter tax. To tackle this problem, the industry introduced SmartNICs comprising energy-efficient CPU cores, FPGA and/or accelerators. With architectures optimized for network-intensive applications, they promise to notably reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) of datacenters primarily through improving energy efficiency. As such, this paper sets out to investigate the overall energy efficiency of an Intel Xeon CPU based server with an NVIDIA BlueField-2 SmartNIC, especially under service level objective (SLO) constraints which matter for many datacenter services.