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.

With more and more fast devices (especially persistent memory, aka. PMEM) equipped in data center, there is great pressure on CPU to drive those devices (e.g., Intel Optane DC persistent memory) for persistency purpose under heavy workloads. Because there is no DMA related capability provided by persistent memory compared with those hdds and SSD, thus CPU needs to participate the data operations on the persistent memory all the time. In this talk, we would like to mitigate the CPU pressure via hardware based memory offloading devices (e.g., Intel's IOAT and DSA).