2020-04-29 SmartNIC SC Meeting Agenda/Minutes

Attendance

Interim Project Committee Members

Resources

Agenda

• Ground Rules
• Roll call
• Roadmap for upcoming meetings
• Template for a Linaro hosted project
• Call for initiative proposals

Minutes

[Andrea] Today’s agenda - project structure and way of working. Next week we will discuss technical priorities and scope.

Ground Rules

This is an open call, we have not set up any NDA, feel free to share the meeting minutes, recordings and slides from this call within your company. We kindly ask not to further forward this material outside your companies.

Roll call

• SeanV, Director of solutions at Ampere - Vast history from the previous role running smartNIC at Intel. Very interested in seeing what this turns into. this is a very ambitious project that we shall hone down to just the critical things that will make a difference in the early days of smartNIC evolution.
• David Berry, ecosystem marketing for the Stingray smartNIC team at Broadcom - Interested in key initiatives that will drive broad adoption and enablement for ISVs and early solutions that would run on top of smartNICs.
• Tomas Fredberg, Ericsson - actively pursuing using smartNICs. Our customer base requires that there is a possible selection of different smartNICs as well as different infrastructures controlling them. Mostly interested in getting an ecosystem that is assigning useful and interoperable APIs in suitable places when it comes to management of the hw infrastructure layer or management of acceleration of things like layer 2 layer 3 virtual switch routers as well as application acceleration in the layers later on.
• Li Wan, Futurewei - research lab and principal architect, particularly interested in NVM over Fiber and how we can help each other and collaborate.
• Jonathan Cameron, Huawei R&D in the UK - monitoring what is going on, whether there is good effort towards standardizing things and general ecosystem matters.
• Sowmini Varadhan, Microsoft Azure SDN team - lot’s of similar work that leverages smartNIC and FPGA, interested in projects that get standards across multiple hw.
• Krister Wikstrom, Nokia - representing Jarmo Hillo, monitoring what is going on today, architect from Nokia mobile network.
• Sam Fuller, director solutions and marketing at NXP - interested in this effort primarily because we need a standardised framework for heterogeneous offload in server environments.
• Al Stone, principal Arm kernel engineer at Red Hat - primary interest is the OS will have to support smartNIC and communicate to the server, it is possible that the smartNICs may run Red Hat OS too.
• Graeme Gregory, engineering manager in the Linaro Datacenter and Cloud Group - want to make smartNICs boring, as much as servers
• Andrea Gallo, responsible for membership development at Linaro.
• Paul Isaacs, director of the Linaro Datacenter and Cloud Group.
• Elsie Wahlig, former director of the Linaro Datacenter and Cloud Group.
• Bill Fletcher, Linaro technical liaison Engineer.
• Randy Linnell, working with a few members, Linaro.
• Grant Likely, software architect in the architecture group at Arm - this meeting is the continuation of the efforts from the last little while to enable smartNICs.
• Kshitij - representing the Infrastructure Line of Business at Arm
• Duberly - also part of the Infrastructure Line of Business at Arm
• Tina Tsou, enterprise architect at Arm and Akraino Edge stack TSC co-chair for the smartNIC blueprint - happy to set up a liaison with this group and take the output of this group as the upstream for Akraino smartNIC blueprint.

Roadmap

[Grant] proposed a schedule on how to evaluate the viability of the proposal. Questions:

• what structure works for all or as many companies as possible?
• What is the technical objective?

[Li Wan] first review next week, how are we listing the initiatives?

• [Grant] while preparing this project, gathered input from early 1-1 conversations and created an early list shared in the proposal. It would be more valuable if each potential member would send their list of initiatives to be proposed. Arm will start sharing their list next week. Expecting proposals to foster conversation amongst participants, then the conclusion of the conversation will lead to the creation of a list of Jira cards.
• In a few weeks time, we would look at the list, sort it by priority and discuss how to get it done.
• We will also discuss the project structure, what is missing, what shall be removed in order to make the resulting proposal the most valuable to all.
• Tomas, Li Wan, Sowmini: yes, this sounds good

[Al] Red Hat was one of the original members of LDCG, the collaboration has been enormously beneficial for Red Hat and for the industry at large, it has been very very good. The amount of things that get done via that collaboration is astonishing sometimes, I highly recommend the work with Linaro. Question: LDCG is acting as the host for this project, is it required to be a member of LDCG to be part of this project?

• [Andrea] Linaro has three membership tiers so far: core, club and group. Core and club members can join any project and activity at Linaro. LDCG group members like Red Hat or core members like Arm or Huawei or club members like NXP can join the work in LDCG and this smartNIC project. Companies interested in smartNIC only and not the rest of LDCG would not join if obliged to fund the entire work in LDCG.
• We are introducing this new project membership tier, where new members interested in smartNIC only could join this smartNIC project for a lower fee without having to join and fund the Linaro Datacenter and Cloud Group at large. Based on the scope drafted in the previous meetings and the engineering services to be provided by Linaro, our current proposal is to set a smartNIC project membership fee at $100K/year + 1 engineer.
• In the upcoming calls we will discuss how to reduce or increase the scope of the work and adjust the membership fee accordingly.

Next Steps

Linaro will set up the wiki page in Collaborate, the mailing list and circulate slides, meeting minutes and recordings.

Our next call will be on Wednesday 6th May at 9am PT.

Action Items

• Paul Isaac's (Deactivated) set up SmartNIC page in Collaborate
• Paul Isaac's (Deactivated) set up smartnic@linaro.org mailing list and sub-lists
• Andrea Gallo (Deactivated) circulate meeting notes