2020-06-03 SmartNIC SC Meeting Agenda/Minutes

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Linaro

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

Recording Links