2020-05-14 SmartNIC SC Meeting Agenda/Minutes

Agenda

• Previous meeting minutes:  2020-05-13 SmartNIC SC Meeting Agenda/Minutes
• Review of vote - 2020-05-06 SmartNIC SC Vote Summary (Open Project)
• Open discussion
• AOB

Minutes

• VOTING

  Clarifications - voting is for current meeting notes can be open now without waiting for the official project launch in July. No objections.

  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

  Any candidate from the members?

  • Maciek: looking for a candidate inside Cisco, the challenge is a single domain expert, we have many different domains here
  • Grant: it is important to have the wide picture view and have leadership skills, not necessarily needed to know everything
  • Jarmo: important not to be biased upfront on one technology decision
  
  

  CI colocation hw set up

  X86 as default host

  Can add Arm host as well

  • ServerReady: 1x unit
  • LKFT: 6x units
  • Linaro kernel regression testing: 4 systems running continuously + 2 to investigate regressions
  • Boot architecture validation and Arm server ready, need modifications to the server ready spec to work on smartNIC with an extension
  
  
  • Grant: for LKFT it is primarily for software regressions, if there are not enough smartNIC cards available, is there a subset of LKFT tests that could require a reduced number of cards and allow to focus on Arm server ready and other efforts?
  • Graeme: server architecture work and boot work require an initial reduced number of boards
  • Grant: CPUs are pretty performant, hope there will not be efforts to work on boot time
  
  

  Membership decision process

  Which steps towards making a decision?

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

  • Maciek: in order to convince our organization of the value to participate, drive and invest it is important to start from the big picture from the user perspective - eg use cases, there is an action for Grant to initiate email threads on use cases and Maciek is willing to contribute. Question is which level of details we shall get into for a decision.
  • Maciek: in our experience, a lot of people will take many decisions for granted and feel they do not have a stake in specific hardware and will rather wait and see instead of driving. But when it comes to networking, Cisco participates in many standardisation forums.
  • Maciek: in addition, lifecycle management is very important. Performance, usability, integration. The standardisation is the starting point + use cases + lifecycle + integration. Define the timelines and top priorities and focus on them. Not just a carrot but a stick to, come up with alternative solutions that are about to ship or already shipping (eg AWS Nitro, Azure FPGA and so on)
  • Paul: if you look at the smartNIC page in Collaborate, we have just created the pages on Lifecycle and Security, please add comments to the pages. We will create more pages
  • Maciek: for management decisions, pick up market proof points and use cases and explain how this initiative will address same/similar/new use cases and how. The target is technically-minded business development profiles.
  
  

  Next steps

  Next call will focus on discussing the proposed initiatives.

Action Items

• @ name action item here //dd-mm-yyyy  
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Recording Links

• Meeting -