Patching up Network Data Leaks with Sweeper

Published in 55th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO 2022), 2022

Marina Vemmou, Albert Cho, Alexandros Daglis

Modern NICs write/read packets directly into the LLC, bypassing memory. However, dirty packet writebacks still generate a significant amount of memory traffic, even though the evicted packets are never used again. To this end, we propose Sweeper, which marks the used packets to omit their writeback. Sweeper improves the peak sustainable throughput of a server by up to 2.6X.