fRAC: Remote Accelerator Calls on Hostless FPGAs

arXiv:2504.04404v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Hardware accelerators are essential for meeting microsecond-scale demands in distributed applications, but invoking them over the network remains bottlenecked by host software. Host-mediated paths (RPC, RDMA) still rely on the CPU to reassemble requests and launch accelerators, which dominates end-to-end latency, while packet-level offload on SmartNICs lacks any notion of a complete request. We introduce the Remote Accelerator Call (RAC) paradigm, in which transport ingestion, request reassembly, dispatch, and accelerator invocation are handled entirely in hardware.