IEC Type 5: SmartNIC for Integrated Edge Cloud (IEC) Blueprint Family

Attributes

Description

Informational

Type

New

Industry Sector

Edge Cloud, Telco

Business driver

VPC, 5G UPF can use SmartNIC to accelerate the performance.

Business use cases

•  Demonstrate SmartNIC accelerated Edge stack
  • OVN-K8s in host and OVS offloaded in SmartNIC
• Software ecosystem support for SmartNIC platform
• Kubernetes support for networking acceleration and SmartNIC

Business Cost - Initial Build Cost Target Objective

• Common drivers for x86 and Arm
• Full DPDK support
• Overlay support (VxLAN, GRE)
• Hardware offload for Linux tc
• Crypto offload drivers

Business Cost – Target Operational Objective

• OVN/Open vSwitch
  • Open vSwitch offload on SmartNIC platform
• Kubernetes
  • SmartNIC for Kubernetes
  • Huge page support
  • Node Feature Discovery
  • Related CNI projects：Multus, Cillium, SR-IOV  and OVS-DPDK
• Storage:
  • NVMeoF interface

Security need

• Crypto offload drivers

Regulations

N/A

Other restrictions

N/A

Additional details

N/A

Case Attributes

Description

Informational

Type

New

Blueprint Family - Proposed   Name

Use Case

VPC, 5G UPF

Blueprint proposed Name

Initial POD Cost (capex)

VPC: 1 Rack with 2 servers, each server with 1 SmartNIC

UPF: 3 servers, each server with 1 SmartNIC

Scale & Type

In the gateway, infrastructure service, and edge cloud

Applications

Power Restrictions

SmartNIC: 35W

Infrastructure orchestration

• Bare Metal Provisioning ：Ansible 
• Kubernetes Provisioning ：KuD
• Host OS Level: 
  • Network: cilium/OVN
• SmartNic Arm cores Level:
  • Network: cilium-BPF/ovs-vswitchd/ovs-dpdk/
• Docker for containers and Kubelet for VMs

SDN

Workload Type

• Containers

Additional Details

SmartNic features:

• Needs to provide mechanism to recover from the system crashes remotely.
• Support PXE protocol
• Secure boot/Secure Key Storage