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Smartnics: Current Trends in Research and Industry SmartNICs: Current Trends in Research and Industry Tristan Döring, Henning Stubbe∗, Kilian Holzinger∗ ∗Chair of Network Architectures and Services, Department of Informatics Technical University of Munich, Germany Email: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] Abstract—With ever rising demand, modern cloud environ- 2. Trends and Technological Demands in ments had to evolve fast in the last years. One of these novel Cloud/Hosting Industry problems are the increasing speed requirements in com- bination with present Software-Defined Networks (SDNs). Before diving deeper into the topic of SmartNICs this This paper gives an overview on a new hardware trend section will give a short overview on the current state resulting from this. We illustrate the demand, development, of the industry. The new guiding trend is the virtualiza- implementation and use of the network accelerating Smart- tion of networks, storage, GPUs etc. These techniques NICs. SmartNICs tackle existing problems of NIC-hardware generate network related workloads not only on network such as the lack of flexibility, a requirement for virtualized devices as virtualization can not independently run on e.g. networks. Furthermore the SmartNIC term will be analyzed NICs. The network processing can be divided into two to provide an universal definition. categories, i.e. the data plane and the control plane. The control plane is responsible for the control of the network Index Terms—SmartNIC, network accelerator, data process- structure, i.e. communications between network devices ing unit, fpga-based smartnic, asic-based smartnic, soc-based and assigning tasks to network devices. In other words smartnic it is the implementation of network policies. The data plane handles the actual movement and modification of application data packets. The legacy hardware layout in a 1. Introduction server is a combination of standard NICs and CPU cores. Here the CPU handles the control and data plane. The NICs on the other hand at best accelerate certain data Demand for network performance grows with the ex- plane functions to ease up load on the CPU. That means panded use of the internet and the increasing popularity of in current server environments the network traffic can use cloud-based computing. The combination of standard net- up a significant amount of CPU resources [1, section 3] work interface controllers, dedicated networking hardware (see also section 5.3). and software based virtual packet routing can not keep up The following paragraphs will explain a few common with the increasing speed requirements. One reason for the network technologies present in typical up-to-date server slowing development of CPU performance is the decline environments that are demanding on the CPU. of Moore’s law. E.g. network speeds in the Microsoft Software-Defined Networking (SDN) decouples the Azure platform improved by 50 times between 2009 and network structure from its realization in hardware. That 2017, but CPU performance did not improve in the same means the control plane is controlled by software control speed [1]. Therefore cloud service providers, data center plane policies. These policies are mapped to the data plane operators etc. had to think about new solutions which and executed in hardware. That imposes additional packet enable them to provide their services to the growing and steering and processing requirements and adds additional performance demanding audience with faster and cost ef- workload to the CPU. E.g. Open vSwitch (OVS), an open- ficient performance. A problem known to exist is the lack source software implementation of a multilayer switch, is of programmability/flexibility in regular NIC hardware part of such a virtual network stack. which is built for a number of specific predefined use cases For example storage virtualization also called and at heart still serves the functionality as an interface Software-Defined Storage (SDS) is part of the virtualiza- from the host CPU to the network. This leaves much of tion trend. The idea is to share storage between different the workload to the CPU. This static functionality does not servers over the network. Virtualization and abstraction comply with evolving Software Defined Network (SDN) is used to make the storage look local to applications. policies and Virtual Network Functions (VNF) which are That means all the data traffic has to go through the key parts of current virtualized network environments. network. This brings up some challenges to overcome with There is an increasing demand for better performance even more stress on the CPU which will further increase compared to software solutions without compromising with higher bandwidths. The newest technology is Non- too much flexibility. This leads to the development of Volatile Memory express over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) which the SmartNIC. The novel NICs should be able to handle combines the low latency NVMe-protocol with virtualized more complex tasks independent of the CPU to a certain storage addressing over the network. degree. This is called an in-Network Interface Card (in- For efficient implementations of these protocols, NIC) processing approach. SmartNIC acceleration is vastly beneficial. Seminar IITM WS 20/21, 19 doi: 10.2313/NET-2021-05-1_05 Network Architectures and Services, May 2021 3. What is a SmartNIC? definition lacks one of the most important properties of a SmartNIC, the programmability, the biggest difference Network environments develop to be more complex to a regular NIC. In today’s rapidly changing software- and the trend shifts to more and more virtualized net- defined networks updatability is key to have a future proof work environments. This involves too much networking network environment. Microsoft also supports this opinion overhead on the CPU cores. With rising network speeds in their paper “Azure Accelerated Networking: SmartNICs of currently up to 200Gbps per link the expensive CPU in the Public Cloud” where they list "Maintain host SDN spends too much work for networking. Even though the programmability of VFP” [1] as one of their design goals true value of CPUs lies in their ability for general process- for their in-development Microsoft Azure SmartNIC. Also ing e.g. applications and data analysis. The virtualization contrary to the definition by Alan Freedman use cases or trend makes this even worse with increasing local network application environments should not be mentioned in the traffic in servers due to SDS, SDN and big data. An definition as these are broad and ever changing. obvious solution is to offload this kind of processing to Mellanox’s Vice President of marketing Kevin Deier- specialized external devices. There are already some NIC ling goes even further and defines three different kinds devices that are not considered smart but assist the CPU of NIC devices: Foundational NICs, Intelligent NICs and by performing a huge diversity of network function accel- DPU based SmartNICs [4]. This variety exists because eration including Network virtualization. These functions Mellanox has customers who ask for a SmartNIC because are hardcoded into these NICs. They are considered the they need functionality they refer to as smart and which first step that led to the development of SmartNICs. This is superior to that of a Foundational NIC. But these func- combination of standard NICs and servers is not able to tionalities were also supported by their base line of NIC deliver enough performance to meet the rising demands products, the so-called Intelligent NICs which Mellanox for network speed because of the required application of does not refer to as smart. Kevin Deierling’s approach is to SDN policies [1, section 2.3]. SmartNICs in comparison differentiate NICs by their offered functionality. The fur- to CPU and NIC combinations target to offer a faster, ther differentiation does make sense for Mellanox, because more efficient and lower cost solution including the im- they want customers to perceive their products superior to portant reduction of CPU usage. Another important factor standard NICs. Mellanox defines an Intelligent NIC as a is the required flexibility that current software solutions NIC with extended functionality that is not programmable. offer. The programmable SmartNICs also try to meet this The further differentiation may be confusing because the demand by offering various development kits or even the border between NICs and Intelligent NICs can not be possibility to run existing software to engineers. We will properly defined. In the future the comprehension of what see later how different manufacturers handle this problem. extended NIC functionality is will probably change and with it the definition for Intelligent NICs. 3.1. The Term SmartNIC 3.3. Definiton of SmartNIC "Also called a ’network interface card’ (NIC), a net- work adapter is a plug-in card that enables a computer to Going off of multiple press and industry definitions transmit and receive data on a local network. [...]" [2] we decided to work out a definition of our own that is On the basis of this definition of a classic NIC and universally applicable: also the knowledge of some SmartNIC functions and use A SmartNIC is a device which connects to a network cases a proper definition is worked out. A definition that is and a computer that specializes in hardware-acceleration applicable to the new type of network accelerators called of various standard and software-based network related SmartNICs. The term SmartNIC implicates that it is an tasks. The innovation drivers for its development are free- extension of standard NIC devices, but it is not as simple ing up CPU resources, the requirement for formerly un- as just an increased functionality. The keyword “Smart” reachable speeds and more efficiency. It is able to perform implies some kind of intelligence or the ability to act control and data plane functions by combining NICs with somewhat smart to solve complex tasks.
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