Exploring Mellanox Bluefield SmartNICs as Accelerators for Heterogeneous Architectures [Slides]

Williams, Brody; Esparza, Liliana Aguirre; Poole, Wendy; Poole, Stephen W

doi:10.2172/1565824

Cited by 4 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…Offloading the work to a network processor can reduce messaging overhead to the host and remove an important cause of cache pollution [28], [29]. • Accelerate specialized operations: Some SmartNICs include specialized hardware that can perform common streaming operations (e.g., encryption and regular expression acceleration [6], [36]) more efficiently than generalpurpose processors. Domain-specific hardware has drawn increasing research interest in recent years [30]- [34], and has been considered an important source of computing power to compensate the need of surpassing performance in the age of post-Moore's Law [26], [27], [33], [34].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Performance Characteristics of the BlueField-2 SmartNIC

Jian-shen¹,

Maltzahn²,

Ulmer³

et al. 2021

Preprint

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High-performance computing (HPC) researchers have long envisioned scenarios where application workflows could be improved through the use of programmable processing elements embedded in the network fabric. Recently, vendors have introduced programmable Smart Network Interface Cards (SmartNICs) that enable computations to be offloaded to the edge of the network. There is great interest in both the HPC and high-performance data analytics (HPDA) communities in understanding the roles these devices may play in the data paths of upcoming systems.This paper focuses on characterizing both the networking and computing aspects of NVIDIA's new BlueField-2 SmartNIC when used in a 100Gb/s Ethernet environment. For the networking evaluation we conducted multiple transfer experiments between processors located at the host, the SmartNIC, and a remote host. These tests illuminate how much effort is required to saturate the network and help estimate the processing headroom available on the SmartNIC during transfers. For the computing evaluation we used the stress-ng benchmark to compare the BlueField-2 to other servers and place realistic bounds on the types of offload operations that are appropriate for the hardware.Our findings from this work indicate that while the BlueField-2 provides a flexible means of processing data at the network's edge, great care must be taken to not overwhelm the hardware. While the host can easily saturate the network link, the SmartNIC's embedded processors may not have enough computing resources to sustain more than half the expected bandwidth when using kernel-space packet processing. From a computational perspective, encryption operations, memory operations under contention, and on-card IPC operations on the SmartNIC perform significantly better than the general-purpose servers used for comparisons in our experiments. Therefore, applications that mainly focus on these operations may be good candidates for offloading to the SmartNIC.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Performance Characteristics of the BlueField-2 SmartNIC

Jian-shen¹,

Maltzahn²,

Ulmer³

et al. 2021

Preprint

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“…Figure 6 shows that (un)marshaling and hashing costs account for a significant portion of the runtime even if we don't factor in signature verification. Today, there is an emerging offering of SmartNICs [23], [44], [22] that, in the future, could be used to offload some of these operations, e.g., serialization of messages and line-rate hashing. Furthermore, there are recent related works that use Mellanox NICs to offload TLS [35], which could be used as an equivalent of MACs.…”

Section: A Offloading To Smartnicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards Improving the Performance of BFT Consensus For Future Permissioned Blockchains

Bravo,

István,

Sit

2020

Preprint

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Permissioned Blockchains are increasingly considered in enterprise use-cases, many of which do not require geodistribution, or even disallow it due to legislation. Examples include country-wide networks, such as Alastria, or those deployed using cloud-based platforms such as IBM Blockchain Platform. We expect these blockchains to eventually run in environments with high bandwidth and low latency modern networks, as well as, advanced programmable hardware accelerators in servers.Even though there is renewed interest in BFT consensus algorithms with various proposals targeting Permissioned Blockchains, related work does not optimize for fast networks and does not incorporate hardware accelerators -we make the case that doing so will pay off in the long run. To this end, we reimplemented the seminal PBFT algorithm in a way that allows us to measure different configurations of the protocol. Through this we explore the benefits of various common optimization strategies and show that the protocol is unlikely to saturate more than 10Gbps networks without relying on specialized hardware-based offloading. We discuss two concrete ways in which the cost of consensus in Permissioned Blockchains could be reduced in high speed networking environments, namely, offloading to SmartNICs and implementing the protocol on standalone FPGAs.

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ONLAD-IDS: ONLAD-Based Intrusion Detection System Using SmartNIC

Matsutani

Kondo

2022

2022 IEEE 24th Int Conf on High Performance Computing &Amp; Communications; 8th Int Conf on Data Science &Amp; Systems; 20th In

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Exploring Mellanox Bluefield SmartNICs as Accelerators for Heterogeneous Architectures [Slides]

Cited by 4 publications

References 0 publications

Performance Characteristics of the BlueField-2 SmartNIC

Performance Characteristics of the BlueField-2 SmartNIC

Towards Improving the Performance of BFT Consensus For Future Permissioned Blockchains

ONLAD-IDS: ONLAD-Based Intrusion Detection System Using SmartNIC

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