Networking researchers are facing growing challenges in evaluating and reproducing results for modern network systems. As systems rely on closer integration of system components and cross-layer optimizations in the pursuit of performance and efficiency, they are also increasingly tied to specific hardware and testbed properties. Combined with a trend towards heterogeneous hardware, such as protocol offloads, SmartNICs, and in-network accelerators, researchers face the choice of either investing more and more time and resources into comparisons to prior work or, alternatively, lower the standards for evaluation. We aim to address this challenge by introducing SimBricks, a simulation framework that decouples networked systems from the physical testbed and enables reproducible end-to-end evaluation in simulation. Instead of reinventing the wheel, SimBricks is a modular framework for combining existing tried-and-true simulators for individual components, processor and memory, NIC, and network, into complete testbeds capable of running unmodified systems. In our evaluation, we reproduce key findings from prior work, including dctcp congestion control, NOPaxos in-network consensus acceleration, and the Corundum FPGA NIC.

中文翻译：

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具有端到端仿真的可重现主机网络评估

网络研究人员在评估和再现现代网络系统的结果时面临越来越大的挑战。由于系统在追求性能和效率时依赖于系统组件和跨层优化的紧密集成，因此它们也越来越依赖于特定的硬件和测试平台属性。结合趋向于异构硬件（例如协议卸载，SmartNIC和网络加速器）的趋势，研究人员面临的选择是，要么投入越来越多的时间和资源来与以前的工作进行比较，要么降低评估标准。我们旨在通过引入SimBricks来应对这一挑战，SimBricks是一种模拟框架，可将网络系统与物理测试台分离，并在模拟中实现可重现的端到端评估。与其重新发明轮子，SimBricks是一个模块化框架，用于将针对单个组件，处理器和内存，NIC和网络的现有久经考验的模拟器组合到能够运行未修改系统的完整测试平台中。在我们的评估中，我们重现了先前工作的主要发现，包括dctcp拥塞控制，NOPaxos网络内共识加速和Corundum FPGA NIC。