Chariot: Accelerating Distributed Protocols with Data-Path Accelerator in DPUs

Distributed protocols such as Paxos are fundamental to achieving high reliability and strong consistency in modern distributed systems. However, widely deployed implementations suffer from substantial data-path overhead, especially when built on the standard kernel networking stack. Programmable Data-Path Accelerators (DPAs) in modern DPUs offer new opportunities to accelerate data-path processing for distributed protocols, but effectively offloading such processing remains challenging due to hardware constraints and software complexity. We present Chariot, a set of DPA-based optimizations for distributed protocols. First, Chariot introduces a DPA-based broadcast mechanism that encapsulates data-path complexity behind simple APIs and offloads message transmission to the DPA, exploiting parallel execution to accelerate broadcasting. Second, Chariot provides a DPA-based quorum confirmation mechanism that selectively intercepts acknowledgment packets and performs quorum confirmation on the DPA, reducing hostside processing overhead. Our evaluation shows that Chariot improves the throughput of a classic Multi-Paxos replication protocol by up to $2.2 \times$. Index Terms-Data-Path Accelerator, Distributed Protocols