Publications
2026
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HotNets The NIC Needs an Operating SystemProceedings of the 25th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets), November 2026
Cloud operators increasingly adopt programmable NICs to offload infrastructure functions and enhance CPU utilization for customer workloads. In parallel, recent proposals show potential performance improvements by offloading user-facing application logic, such as ML tasks and data analytics, to NICs. Despite this confluence of infrastructure offerings and use case demands, NICs remain underutilized due to the lack of effective resource management, confining them to infrastructure roles. Existing solutions fail to address the real-time variability of NIC application workloads and ensure isolation in the multi-tenant cloud environment. In this paper, we envision NicOS, a new operating system architecture for programmable NICs in multi-tenant environments. NicOS introduces generalizable resource abstractions and runtime support to enable dynamic provisioning, elastic scaling, and robust isolation. We identify critical research challenges and outline our design proposals for NicOS, aiming to stimulate discussion and inspire future NIC architectures.