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Smart NIC for the Integrated Edge Cloud

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.