Sean Hefty (left) and Venkata Krishnan from Intel
In this video from the 2019 OpenFabrics Workshop in Austin, Sean Hefty and Venkata Krishnan from Intel present: Enabling Applications to Exploit SmartNICs and FPGAs.
Advances in Smart NIC/FPGA with integrated network interface allow acceleration of application-specific computation to be performed alongside communication. This communication works in a synergistic manner with various acceleration models that include inline, lookaside or remotely triggered ones. Bringing this technology to the HPC ecosystem for deployment on next-generation Exascale class systems however requires exposing these capabilities to applications in terms that are familiar to software developers. In this regard, the lack of a standardized software interface that applications can use is an impediment to the deployment of Smart NIC/FPGA in Exascale platforms. We propose extensions to OFI to expose these capabilities. This would improve the performance of middleware based on this interface. And in turn, this will indirectly benefit applications that use that middleware without requiring any application changes. Participants will learn about the potential for Smart NIC/FPGA application acceleration and will have the opportunity to contribute application expertise and domain knowledge to a discussion of how Smart NIC/FPGA acceleration technology can bring individual applications into the Exascale era.”
- Sean Hefty is Open source software lead and maintainer of high-performance computing/networking solutions (see libfabric.org) at Intel.
- Venkata Krishnan is a Principal Engineer at Intel.
