Leveraging high-performance data transfer to offload data management and analysis tasks to DPUs

Speaker from Sandia: Whit Schonbein and Scott Levy

Network interface controllers (NICs) with general-purpose compute capabilities (SmartNICs) present an opportunity for reducing host application overheads by offloading tasks that are not central to the execution of the target application to a SmartNIC.  In this talk, we will discuss the role of SmartNICs in high performance computing (HPC) and then describe our approach for leveraging SmartNICs to offload data management and analysis tasks.

Data management and analysis plays a critical role in our application workflows. Our applications generate enormous amounts of complex data that require analysts to apply powerful tools for analysis and visualization.  Offloading tasks associated with these tools to a SmartNIC has the potential to free up host resources that can be exploited to advance the target application.  Effectively offloading tasks from host to SmartNIC also requires the host data associated with the offloaded computation to be transferred to the SmartNIC.  To address this need, we introduce a high-performance, general-purpose data movement service that facilitates the offloading of tasks to SmartNICs: the SmartNIC Data Movement Service (SDMS).  SDMS provides near-line-rate transfer bandwidths between the host and NIC with minimal host involvement..