There has been a lot of talk in the industry in last couple of years around SMART-NICs. In this blog, we share our perspective on this new class of network accelerators and the role they play in future of compute platforms. These are expected to play a key role in compute platforms for large Data Centers, Edge and Telco 5G environments.
There is a general trend in the industry around building compute platforms that consist of general purpose CPUs coupled with dedicated accelerators (SOCs and ASICs). Industry also refers to these as Domain Specific Architectures, where in host processor is used to set things up and accelerators do the compute processing for the specific problem domain. A number of factors are driving the adoption of this hybrid computing architecture:
- The increasing number of cores in the CPUs have improved the CPU performance, but memory and I/O bandwidth improvements haven’t kept up with it. Combining CPUs with accelerators moves some of the processing to accelerator cards without transferring the data back & forth between memory, IO and CPU.
- As network speeds and disk performance are going up, some of the associated processing (network services and data processing / analytics) is moving closer to network in the form of FPGAs to avoid sending un-necessary data to host memory.
- Telcos are moving towards virtualizing the network edge with evolution to 5G. Hardware acceleration will play a key role in the 5G architecture for network services offload, 5G network slicing and real time data processing.
SMART-NICs are a class of accelerators which consist of a standard NIC (Network Interface Controller) combined with FPGA and CPU cores (ARM or x86 cores) as shown in Fig 1. These are expected to play a key role in future system architecture because most of the infrastructure services and applications are or will be network connected. Some examples of infrastructure services are network services (virtual switches, firewalls, load balancers, Telco virtual network functions, SD-WAN), storage services (SDS software for block, file, object storage), analytics and machine learning. These infrastructure services moved to software defined architectures with SDN (Software Defined Networking), SDS (Software Defined Storage) and distributed data analytics (Hadoop, Spark).
As network speeds are going up from, there is a need to move the associated network processing from host CPU to network adapters to keep up with these data rates and reduce the amount of data sent to IO bus and host memory for processing. Hypervisor resident virtual switches provide a number of functions including data movement, virtual switching overlay, encryption, deep packet inspection, load balancing and firewall. It is hard to scale these features to future network speeds of 50/100/200G. FPGA and NIC on the SMART-NIC (Fig 1) enable this data plane offload to scale to higher throughput, lower latency and higher packets per second (pps) performance. Other higher level network services and Telco virtual network functions (VNFs) are also starting to leverage the FPGA and NIC ASIC to offload data plane processing and new features like network slicing for 5G.
Some of the data plane functions also benefit from moving associated control plane closer to the data plane, leading to embedded CPU cores on SMART-NICs. What are the benefits?
- Can support any OS running on the host CPU and enable bare-metal containers.
- Enables higher security, because embedded signed images can be delivered for software on SMART-NIC and it is independent of any security attack on the OS or applications running on host CPU.
- Software running on the SMART-NIC can isolate a server from rest of the network if a security threat is detected.
The offload of network functions via SMART-NIC enables opportunity to further optimize the data-flows in overall compute system as shown in Fig 2. Software running on SMART-NIC can enable direct data transfers to server storage and GPUs without using host memory as a staging area for data transfer, thus improving performance, reducing latency and freeing up host CPU cycles.
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