I/O Virtualization (IOV) is a cornerstone of cloud computing, with container networking as a critical form of IOV in modern cloud paradigms. While container networks serve as feature-rich infrastructure, they incur a high CPU tax yet leave room for efficiency improvement. A natural idea is to offload container networks onto hardware such as SmartNICs via IOV interfaces. However, existing IOV mechanisms, such as SR-IOV, are misaligned with container requirements: limited device scalability versus high container density, packet-layer abstraction versus application-layer processing demands, and coarse-grained virtualization versus fine-grained container workloads.

Rack-scale interconnects serve as critical datapaths for emerging communication-intensive systems to scale up. Innovative solutions for this datapath are rising at a rapid pace, especially those based on Ethernet. However, existing hardware-based solutions, such as RDMA, face performance issues, particularly for small-message memory access, and suffer from the inflexibility of hardware-fixed processing. The community is actively pursuing efficient, flexible, and cost-effective rack-scale datapaths.

Emerging Zoned Namespace (ZNS) SSDs, providing the coarse-grained zone abstraction, hold the potential to significantly enhance the cost efficiency of future storage infrastructure and mitigate performance unpredictability. However, existing ZNS SSDs have a static zoned interface, making them in-adaptable to workload runtime behavior, unscalable to underlying hardware capabilities, and interfering with co-located zones. Applications either under-provision the zone resources yielding unsatisfied throughput, create over-provisioned zones and incur costs, or experience unexpected I/O latencies. We propose eZNS, an elastic-ZNS interface that exposes an adaptive zone with predictable characteristics. eZNS comprises two major components: a zone arbiter that manages zone allocation and active resources on the control plane, and a hierarchical I/O scheduler with read congestion control and write admission control on the data plane. Together, eZNS enables the transparent use of a ZNS SSD and closes the gap between application requirements and zone interface properties. Our evaluations over RocksDB demonstrate that eZNS outperforms a static zoned interface by 17.7% and 80.3% in throughput and tail latency, respectively, at most.

Emerging SmartNIC-based disaggregated NVMe storage has become a promising storage infrastructure due to its competitive IO performance and low cost. These SmartNIC JBOFs are shared among multiple co-resident applications, and there is a need for the platform to ensure fairness, QoS, and high utilization. Unfortunately, given the limited computing capability of the SmartNICs and the non-deterministic nature of NVMe drives, it is challenging to provide such support on today's SmartNIC JBOFs.

In this work, we developed a novel multithreaded variable size chunking method, MUCH, which exploits the multicore architecture of the modern microprocessors. The legacy single threaded variable size chunking method leaves much to be desired in terms of effectively exploiting the bandwidth of the state of the art storage devices. MUCH guaranteeschunking invariability: The result of chunking does not change regardless of the degree of multithreading or the segment size. This is achieved by inter and intra-segment coalescing at the master thread and Dual Mode Chunking at the client thread. We developed an elaborate performance model to determine the optimal multithreading degree and the segment size. MUCH is implemented in the prototype deduplication system. By fully exploiting the available CPU cores (quad-core), we achieved up to$\times$4 increase in the chunking performance (MByte/sec). MUCH successfully addresses the performance issues of file chunking which is one of the performance bottlenecks in modern deduplication systems by parallelizing the file chunking operation while guaranteeing Chunking Invariability.

In this work, we focus on optimizing the deduplication system by adjusting the pertinent factors in fingerprint lookup and chunking, the factors which we identify as the key ingredients of efficient deduplication. For efficient fingerprint lookup, we propose fingerprint management scheme called LRU-based Index Partitioning. For efficient chunking, we propose Incremental Modulo-K(INC-K) algorithm which is optimized Rabin's algorithm where we significantly reduce the number of arithmetic operations exploiting the algebraic nature of modulo arithmetic. LRU-based Index Partitioning uses the notion of tablet and enforces access locality of the fingerprint lookup in storing fingerprints. We maintain tablets with LRU manner to exploit temporal locality of the fingerprint lookup. To preserve access correlation across the tablets, we apply prefetching in maintaining tablet list. We propose Context-aware chunking to maximize chunking speed and deduplication ratio. We develop prototype backup system and performed comprehensive analysis on various factors and their relationship: average chunk size, chunking speed, deduplication ratio, tablet management algorithms, and overall backup speed. By increasing the average chunk size from 4 KB to 10 KB, chunking time increases by 34.3 percent, deduplication ratio decreases by 0.66 percent and the overall backup speed increases by 50 percent (from 51.4 MB/sec to 77.8 MB/sec).