A Hardware Accelerator for Protocol Buffers
Sagar Karandikar, Chris Leary, Chris Kennelly, Jerry Zhao, Dinesh Parimi, Borivoje Nikolić, Krste Asanović, Parthasarathy Ranganathan
Abstract
Serialization frameworks are a fundamental component of scale-out systems, but introduce significant compute overheads. However, they are amenable to acceleration with specialized hardware. To understand the trade-offs involved in architecting such an accelerator, we present the first in-depth study of serialization framework usage at scale by profiling Protocol Buffers (“protobuf”) usage across Google’s datacenter fleet. We use this data to build HyperProtoBench, an open-source benchmark representative of key serialization-framework user services at scale. In doing so, we identify key insights that challenge prevailing assumptions about serialization framework usage.