DPIO: A Unified I/O Architecture for Heterogeneous CPU and DPU NVMeoF

Abstract

To alleviate the overhead of moving massive data in modern data centers, Data Processing Units (DPUs) are increasingly deployed to offload NVMe-over-Fabrics (NVMeoF) remote storage access from the CPU. However, current heterogeneous CPU-DPU systems suffer from inflexible resource partitioning, leading to suboptimal utilization of computational power and network bandwidth. In this paper, we present DPIO, a unified I/O processing stack designed to harmonize the collaboration between CPU and DPU in NVMeoF environments. By implementing fine-grained task orchestration, DPIO effectively bridges the performance gap between DPU offloading and CPU processing, achieving near-optimal system performance across diverse workloads. Our real-world implementation demonstrates that DPIO delivers over 2 × higher throughput compared to conventional DPU-centric NVMeoF approaches, significantly enhancing the efficiency of data-intensive applications.