2020-06-03 SmartNIC SC Meeting Agenda/Minutes

Agenda

• Previous meeting minutes:  2020-05-28 SmartNIC SC Meeting Agenda/Minutes
• Review of how proposals are proceeding
• Review of project structure
• AOB
• 

Minutes

• Recap of target areas - non-exhaustive list options in slides
• Tomas asked about ranking of list. Paul clarified, no particular order.
• Tomas would like to see Enterprise and Telecoms have a wider scope.
• Discussion: Hyperscalers able to utilise their own internal resources to build whatever they need. Hyperscalers might then push out to the market what they have developed to promote a 'defacto' option.
  • Telecoms (Ericsson and Huawei) would like to see commoditized SmartNIC options - features become standardised for ease of exchangeable hardware. 
• Discussion: (Grant/Paul) What's the minimum CPU capability for SmartNICs - suggestion (Arm biased, to be open/fair) is a minimum of Cortex A72 and ideally Neoverse.
• The CPU wouldn't be the only processing capability on the SmartNIC it can include accelerators/fpga/asic
• Current proposals are available for review and editing
• Proposal options have been widened to include 5G
• Ensure that the proposals have manageable resource constraints
• Standards proposal: The amount of work is considerable, aiming for Firmware, EDK2/UEFI, Redfish, how to talk from NIC to host. OVS is of great interest.
  • Discussion as to which standards to include - are they written to specific hardware, such as OCP (Facebook/Google participate) or to the Software-only emulation. Sam interested to see if we can leverage OCP.
  • Tomas highlighted the 'just a bunch of interface cards'
  • Sam would like to see what software models can be offloaded to the SmartNIC (not just dataplane traffic) - approach hyperscalers to see what offload interests they have.
  • OCP could be a target platform however the PCIe formfactor is preferred.
  • ODSA is about disaggregated compute structure
  • Hardware donations welcome
• Software model proposal: based on SBSA QEMU 
  • Use of VirtIO to link multiple software-only SmartNICs
  • Looking at offload opportunities
• Security proposal
  • Sam has been working on the proposal
• Storage proposal
  • Futurewei has been trying to engage with Xilinx
  • Lookin to include Initiator and Target options
• Dataplane / Network proposal
  • Request to see if interest in renaming Dataplane to Network
  • Grant raised that many are the proposal names are too generic and would prefer more specific naming
  • No objection to rename to Network
• 5G proposal
  • New page for open proposals. So far no new entries.
• Project Timeline/Structure
  • Andrea - Could a specific Use Case be developed which can converge the top down/bottom up approaches.
  • Membership structure - what is a strong must have , a nice to have, or a put on hold. This will help tune the proposals.
  • Grant - need to be informed as to what are the priorities for the members
  • Members being asked to say if there are real issues
  • Next couple of weeks to make the technical scope as much as possible

Action Items

• @ name action item here //dd-mm-yyyy  
• ALL - Work on proposals
• Paul Isaac's (Deactivated) Distribute slides prior to meetings  
• Grant Likely Server Ready Standards
• 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