Time and Location: 3/25/2020, Wed., 4 p.m., Online seminar

Speaker: Mr. Brody Williams

Title: Investigating Scientific Workload Acceleration using Bluefield SmartNICs

Abstract: Modern computing platforms whose workloads generate large amounts of network traffic, such as cloud and HPC systems, often suffer from performance bottlenecks associated with the network interface. In order to alleviate the effects of this obstacle, a new generation of accelerators known as ‘SmartNICs’, which are designed to offload low level networking tasks from the processor into the NIC, have emerged. The Mellanox Bluefield series of SmartNICs are a further refinement of this paradigm that combine a powerful system on chip, memory controller, and ConnectX network adapter into a device with enhanced capabilities.  In contrast to their ASIC and FPGA based analogs, the power and flexibility of Bluefield SmartNICs provides the potential for offloading encryption, communication, and even computation intensive tasks from the host device to the SmartNIC. These capabilities make them ideal for acceleration at the network edge and even within the network itself. In this presentation, we investigate Bluefield-based acceleration for scientific applications. In particular, we focus on the LANL PENNANT mini-app as a proxy for larger scientific workloads.