IEC Type 5 is focused on SmartNIC Datacenter Services across all clouds.
Purpose/Features:
IEC Type 5 is focused on SmartNIC, which can accelerate network performance and provide more management convenience. In general, the architecture consists of two layers: IaaS (IEC) and SmartNIC layer. But in R4, we have two simple layers: Host Layer, SmartNIC Layer.
IEC Type 5 is focused on SmartNIC Datacenter Services across all clouds.
For Release 4, we focus on implementation of OVS-DPDK offload into SmartNIC, which architecture is described as the diagram below.
The R4 release evaluates the throughput and packet forwarding performance of the Mellanox BlueField SmartNIC card. A DPDK based Open vSwitch (OVS-DPDK) is used as the virtual switch, and the network traffic is virtualized with the VXLAN encapsulation.
Since the community version OVS-DPDK is considered experimental and not mature enough, which only supports “partial offload” and lacks of utilization of the full performance advantage of Mellanox NICs. Thus the OVS-DPDK we used is a fork of the community Open vSwitch. We develop our own offload code which enables the full hardware offload with DPDK rte_flow APIs.
To Deploy the Test architecture, we use a private Jenkins and an Intel server equipped with a BlueField v1 SmartNIC and Ansible to automatically setup the filesystem image and install the OVS-DPDK in the SmartNICs. The test architecture is shown as below.
Key features in R3:
- Host layer
- SmartNIC layer
- OVS-DPDK offload in SmartNIC
For more information visit our wiki.