2020-05-28 SmartNIC SC Meeting Agenda/Minutes

Agenda

• Previous meeting minutes:  2020-05-27 SmartNIC SC Meeting Agenda/Minutes
• Technology proposal review
• AOB

Minutes

• Summary of US meeting(?)
• Action on Linaro to explain the way of  working. If interested, let Graeme know and will invite you
• About 1 week late on the original schedule for deploying the project.
• Should have a table of who proposed initiatives as a quick reference
• Next meeting will be a health check on the project in general
• Software model - Shashi Mallela, Linaro
• Investigations around using two QEMU instances to model the host and the smartNIC connected via virtio
• Lifecycle - Al Stone, Red Hat
• Still work-in-progress
• Waiting for discussion on the mailing list
• Different use cases being proposed, eg fixed smartnic firmware vs dynamic workloads being downloaded from the host or infrastructure
• Security - Sam Fuller, NXP
• Security, key management, encrypted DRAM, etc.
• Grant: had a long discussion with Tomas from Ericsson after our project call yesterday, significant overlap between standards and security related to using smartnic as the root of trust and more
• Standards - Grant LIkely, Arm
• Extend some of the tooling and certifications from server ready to other areas, which are not as complex as servers yet need a compliance program
• Standardization of management and firmware fits well here
• Had a breakout meeting with Tomas Fredberg from Ericsson yesterday, will publish more in the wiki pages in Collaborate.
• Anybody interested in joining this call, please contact Grant/Graeme/Paul or Andrea
• Storage - Li Wan, Futurewei
• Xilinx interested to collaborate and widen the scope to both initiator and target
• Grant and Tomas also discussed the NVMe interface as part of the standards discussions
• Maciek: Any interest in NVME-OF?
• Grant: Specifically smartNIC to host interface. Can do nvme-of gateway on smartnic. Aim to provide portability on VMs. i.e. can you map an NVME interface to SW defined storage?
• Dataplane - Maciek, Cisco
• Started filling in a Google Docs: SmartNIC with VPP Data-Plane
• It shall be renamed to Networking, not dataplane
• These are not use cases anymore rather technical areas
• Check out Pensando or AWS Nitrogen, the model is that the fabric is done and all intelligence is at the edge. Not in the TOR switch but completely in the smartNIC → very powerful fully automated proposal
• Grant: break down into individual technical pieces. Possibly valuable to have two levels of discussion:
• Deployment model and lifecycle
• Building blocks (check recording at 35min after the start)
• Proposal to organise a break out meeting to flesh out the details yet maintaining the high level view as well, then get back to the project committee with the proposal - best is towards the end of next week or later
• Maciek agrees, early the week after would work
• Yasu NTT Japan
• Open source 5G server with kubernetes smartNIC
• How does this align with the existing proposed initiatives?
• Grant: this project is about (1) standardization of smartNIC interfaces and (2) use case. The proposed kubernetes use case is very relevant for the latter. Please describe what you would like to see, what is missing for kubernetes to support smartNIC
• Yasu: just ramping up, would like to get connected with vendors who are working on this, eg Xilinx or NXP
• Grant: Could set up a separate call on this with interested parties
• Andrea/Graeme will start an email thread on this

Action Items

• @ name action item here //dd-mm-yyyy  
• ALL - Work on proposals
• Paul Isaac's (Deactivated) Distribute slides prior to meetings  
• Former user (Deleted) - Linaro's way of working
• Grant Likely Server Ready
• Former user (Deleted) Shashi Mallela (Deactivated) Software model development
• Al Stone - LifeCycle
• Sam Fuller - Security
• Li Wan Donna Yasay  - Storage
• Maciek Konstantynowicz - Dataplane
• Former user (Deleted) - 5G
•  
• <end>

Recording Links