Don't You Worry 'Bout a Packet: Unified Programming for In-Network Computing

In-network computing is gaining momentum as programmable switches are increasingly employed for compute acceleration. Designed for packet processing, data plane programming languages force developers to express compute in networking terms, resulting in a complex, error-prone practice. We envision the unification of switch and host programming and propose the Net Compute Language (NCL), a C/C++ extension for expressing computational kernels for switches to execute. NCL implements Compute Centric Communication (C3), our proposed programming model for INC under which, point-to-point primitives are augmented to carry out computations. We motivate our approach with real-world use cases and discuss the technical challenges for its realization.