Intel SmartNIC/IPU based NVMe/TCP Initiator Offload

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.

First, we will introduce our high performance 200GbE IPU, then we will present the software components composed with SPDK based NVMe over TCP software stack. Second, we will share the performance optimizations in SPDK from last year which leverages on Intel® Ethernet 800 Series with Application Device Queues (ADQ) to improve SPDK based NVMe/TCP initiator performance. Third, we will share some performance results from Intel® Ethernet 800 Series with Application Device Queues (ADQ), which demonstrates ADQ significantly improves the performance (increase the IOPS and reduces the longtail latency) for the SPDK based NVMe over TCP initiator.