Technical perspective: DFI: The Data Flow Interface for High-Speed Networks

This paper highlights the case of Data Flow Interface (DFI), a library that uses Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) in the background to provide a declarative way to specify data exchanges across nodes specifically tailored to data processing applications. DFI abstracts away many of the elements of RDMA and replaces them with data structures and interfaces more suitable to data management. The paper makes a convincing case that DFI is more suitable for data processing than existing solutions by presenting several use cases where DFI takes care of complex tasks that RDMA would force the developer to manage manually. The performance numbers are impressive, showing the DFI does not add any significant overhead and that sometimes leads to better results as some of the complex steps required when using RDMA directly are not longer needed.