Infrastructure Processing Units (IPU) is an evolution of SmartNIC, focusing on infrastructure processing such as networking offload and storage offload. IPU is a critical ingredient in the disaggregated computer architectures and becomes a control point in the DC-oF (Data Center of the Future). In this talk, we would like to share the NVMe over TCP Initiator implementation as an example for IPU based storage offload, focusing on SPDK (https://spdk.io) support for IPU based NVMe over TCP Initiator solution.

NOTE: this paper was developed by Ziye Yang, a Staff Software Engineer at Intel and is being presented by colleague Yadong Li, a Principal Engineer in the Ethernet Products Group at Intel. In many usage cases, FaaS applications usually run or deployed in container/Virtual machine environment for isolation purpose.

In this presentation, we will describe a complete end-to-end Software Defined Storage (SDS) solution for cloud data centers using Infrastructure Processing Units (IPUs). IPUs provide a high performance NVMe interface to host, abstracting away the details of networked storage and enabling storage disaggregation and bare-metal hosting. NVMe/TCP is a high performance protocol widely deployed because of its ease of deployment and better scalability in large scale-out networks.