2020-05-13 SmartNIC SC Meeting Agenda/Minutes

Steering Committee Members 

Member Guests

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Meeting ID: 299 040 2863
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Linaro

• Previous meeting minutes:  2020-05-06 SmartNIC SC Meeting Agenda/Minutes

• Review of vote - 2020-05-06 SmartNIC SC Vote Summary (Open Project)

• Open discussion

• AOB

• VOTING

  Clarifications - voting is to approve to make current meeting notes public now without waiting for the official project to start in July.

  Project committee

  No questions, all clear.

  Engineering team

  Any candidate for the tech lead role?

  From the Linaro side we have Paul and Graeme as engineering director / manager in supervisor roles and Shashi as Linaro resource ready to start. CI resource from Linaro not assigned yet.

  Tech lead

  • Grant: translation from use cases to engineering directions for the team, someone who is already active. Neutral role yet influential and good for a member company to fill this role.

  • Al: it can be an incredibly fun opportunity for the candidate to get this role.

  • Gil: thinking about it, will get back next week.

   

  CI colocation hw set up

  X86 as default host, can add Arm host as well

  • ServerReady: 1x unit

  • LKFT: 6x units - 4 units for continuous test execution and 2 for investigation of any regressions or failures.

   

  First priority testing

  • Graeme: start from ServerReady, need an addendum for level 3 for smartNIC compared to other servers. LKFT is very useful for distro vendors when getting ready to deploy images

  • Tomas: preferable to have the majority as x86 hosts to reflect the reality of the market deployment. Communication over BMC or other smartNIC channel as a secondary track for the management entity is important, evaluate the BMC and recommend something as much Redfish-ish as possible rather than openBMC.

  • Grant: definitely there is a value to having a BMC integration initiative. Would Tomas volunteer to draft this and propose it next week?

    • Tomas: Yes.

  • Grant: the x86 host shall be there, if we did not have an x86 host in the lab we would not be able to progress on the project. For Arm it is also valuable to have an Arm host in addition to an x86 host.

   

  Membership decision process

  Which steps towards making a decision?

  Which information is required to submit membership for approval to your management line?

  • Al: initial cost and initial personnel requirement, initial project timeline - these are the initial info required

  • Tomas: there is a chicken and egg problem, each management line will ask who else is already participating. We can start from looking at the list of companies joining the calls

  • Sowmini: in addition to money and resources, what are the challenges to address? How do we know we are done?

    • Grant: that is one of the reasons we are starting from defining the engineering initiatives.

    • Tomas: this is good, also create a list of initiatives that we would like to add in the future.

  • Tomas: add a map of the data center ecosystem, what is the smartNIC project going to interface with, what are the standardization points, what to engage with to be successful.

    • Grant: very good to have an open discussion and a white board session on this in a dedicated call

  • Grant: we started by restricting to one person per company to manage the conversations effectively. What if we open up to multiple people per company, yet keeping one person only for voting?

    • Al: +1

    • Gil: only members or also external companies?

      • Grant: right now nobody is a member, contact Andrea if you want to recommend to invite anybody in particular

  Wiki pages

  Lifecycle / Al Stone

  • Just added initial thoughts, some protocol to define the communication between the host and the smartNIC. There are 3 different types of smartNICs

  Security / Sam Fuller

  • Already started adding thoughts

  Paul: please review, start adding comments in the collaborate pages directly. We will review them all next week.

• Meeting recording -