2020-IEEE-HotI-Panel-SmartNICs

This was an August 19, 2020 IEEE Hot Interconnects Panel titled "SmartNICs vs. DPUs, Which Wins?" Here are some points made during this panel discussion which I found valuable:

1. SmartNICs provide a second computing domain inside the server that could be used for security, orchestration, and control plane tasks. While some refer to this as an air-gapped domain it isn't, but it is far more secure than running inside the same x86 system domain. This can be used to securely enable bare-metal as a service. -- Michael Kagan

2. Several vendors are actively collaborating on a Portable NIC Architecture (PNA) designed to execute P4 code. When available, it would then be possible to deliver containers with P4 code that could run on any NIC that supported this PNA model. -- Vipin Jain

3. The control plane needs to execute in the NIC for two reasons, first to offload the host CPU from what is quickly become 30% overhead for processing network traffic, and second to improve the determinism of the applications running on the server. --Vipin Jain

4. App stores are inevitable, when is the question. While some think it could be years, others believe it will happen within a year. Xilinx has partnered with a company that already has one for FPGA accelerators so the leap to SmartNICs shouldn't be that challenging. --Gordon Brebner

5. The ISA is un-important, it's the micro-architecture that matters. Fungible selected MIPS-64 because of it's support for simultaneous multi-threaded execution with fine-grained context switching. -- Pradeep Sindhu. While others feel that the eco-system of tools and the wide access to developers is most important and that is why they've selected ARM.

6. It should be noted that normally the ARM cores are NOT in the data plane.

[madhavacheethirala]

Very good and healthy discussion. Thanks for bringing relevant experts to the table. Would like to see more of these.

[GoogleUser-eero]

very valuable discussion. I am educated