High-performance computing (HPC) researchers have long envisioned scenarios where application workflows could be improved through the use of programmable processing elements embedded in the network fabric. Recently, vendors have introduced programmable Smart Network Interface Cards (SmartNICs) that enable computations to be offloaded to the edge of the network. There is great interest in both the HPC and high-performance data analytics communities in understanding the roles these devices may play in the data paths of upcoming systems. This paper focuses on characterizing both the networking and computing aspects of NVIDIA's new BlueField-2 SmartNIC when used in an Ethernet environment. For the networking evaluation we conducted multiple transfer experiments between processors located at the host, the SmartNIC, and a remote host. These tests illuminate how much processing headroom is available on the SmartNIC during transfers. For the computing evaluation we used the stress-ng benchmark to compare the BlueField-2 to other servers and place realistic bounds on the types of offload operations that are appropriate for the hardware. Our findings from this work indicate that while the BlueField-2 provides a flexible means of processing data at the network's edge, great care must be taken to not overwhelm the hardware. While the host can easily saturate the network link, the SmartNIC's embedded processors may not have enough computing resources to sustain more than half the expected bandwidth when using kernel-space packet processing. From a computational perspective, encryption operations, memory operations under contention, and on-card IPC operations on the SmartNIC perform significantly better than the general-purpose servers used for comparisons in our experiments. Therefore, applications that mainly focus on these operations may be good candidates for offloading to the SmartNIC.

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BlueField-2 SmartNIC的性能特征

高性能计算（HPC）研究人员对方案进行了长期的设想，可以通过使用嵌入在网络结构中的可编程处理元素来改善应用程序的工作流程。最近，供应商推出了可编程的智能网络接口卡（SmartNIC），使计算可以卸载到网络边缘。HPC和高性能数据分析社区对了解这些设备在即将到来的系统的数据路径中可能扮演的角色非常感兴趣。本文重点介绍了在以太网环境中使用时NVIDIA新的BlueField-2 SmartNIC的网络和计算方面的特征。为了进行网络评估，我们在主机，SmartNIC和远程主机上的处理器之间进行了多次传输实验。这些测试说明了在传输期间SmartNIC上有多少可用处理空间。为了进行计算评估，我们使用了Stress-ng基准将BlueField-2与其他服务器进行比较，并对适合于硬件的卸载操作的类型进行了实际限制。我们从这项工作中获得的发现表明，尽管BlueField-2提供了一种在网络边缘处理数据的灵活方法，但必须格外小心，以免使硬件不堪重负。尽管主机可以轻松使网络链接饱和，但是当使用内核空间数据包处理时，SmartNIC的嵌入式处理器可能没有足够的计算资源来维持期望带宽的一半以上。从计算的角度来看，加密操作，竞争下的内存操作，以及SmartNIC上的板载IPC操作的性能明显优于我们用于实验比较的通用服务器。因此，主要专注于这些操作的应用程序可能是卸载到SmartNIC的不错选择。