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Fornax: A Hardware-Centric Session Management in Large Public Cloud Network#

SIGCOMM 2025 digest Program Core pick Coimbra · 8–11 September 2025

Abstract Paper Recording

Heng Yu et al. (Zhongguancun Lab, Tencent, Peking U.)

Play the recording: Fornax: A Hardware-Centric Session Management in Large Public Cloud Network

Why: SmartNIC-accelerated cloud network functions live or die on their management mechanism; flow-as-unit, one-way command models don't scale to huge tables.

What: A shift from software-centric to hardware-centric management using session (not flow) as the unit, managing up to 16M sessions while cutting software storage 80% and CPU 77%.

How: A session-empowered hardware engine plus two-way hardware-driven management protocols and a lightweight software manager for scalability.

Where applicable: Tencent-specific SmartNIC production setup; the session-as-unit + two-way-protocol idea is a transferable design principle.