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Craig Ulmer

Extending Composable Data Services into SmartNICs

2023-05-19 pub smartnics hpc

In my SmartNICs project we've been busy building examples of how collections of SmartNICs in an HPC platform can work together to implement data services that are useful to HPC workflows. In the Fall we built a distributed, particle-sifting example that reorganizes simulation results into a form that's easier for downstream applications to consume. We used Faodel to control the distribution of data between collections of SmartNICs and Apache Arrow to reorganize the data. Thanks to Sandia's Glinda cluster, this is the first time we've had the opportunity to run SmartNIC experiments at the scale of 100 cards.



Abstract

Advanced scientific-computing workflows rely on composable data services to migrate data between simulation and analysis jobs that run in parallel on high-performance computing (HPC) platforms. Unfortunately, these services consume compute-node memory and processing resources that could otherwise be used to complete the workflow's tasks. The emergence of programmable network interface cards, or SmartNICs, presents an opportunity to host data services in an isolated space within a compute node that does not impact host resources. In this paper we explore extending data services into SmartNICs and describe a software stack for services that uses Faodel and Apache Arrow. To illustrate how this stack operates, we present a case study that implements a distributed, particle-sifting service for reorganizing simulation results. Performance experiments from a 100-node cluster equipped with 100Gb/s BlueField-2 SmartNICs indicate that current SmartNICs can perform useful data management tasks, albeit at a lower throughput than hosts.

Best Paper Award

At the conference they gave us an award for best paper. I really enjoyed meeting the other CompSYS folks, and had good, friendly discussions with a number of people.


Publication

  • Compsys Paper Craig Ulmer, Jianshen Liu, Carlos Maltzahn, and Matthew L. Curry, "Extending Composable Data Services into SmartNICs" in Second Workshop on Composable Systems (CompSYS), May 2023.

Presentation