Use of BlueField-SmartNICs in Offloading One-Sided Communication Primitives

Poster is on display and will be presented at the poster pitch session.

---

This poster discusses designs presented for offloading One-Sided Communication (1SC) to SmartNICs such as NVIDIA BlueField DPUs. Prior work has offloaded non/blocking two-sided communication, but 1SC has not been studied in-depth. To solve this, we propose a set of APIs that can be leveraged by MPI and OpenSHMEM libraries for 1SC, as these primitives are already non-blocking by default. We utilize advanced network primitives to allow for efficient fetching and offloading of communication and synchronization primitives to the DPU to allow for further overlap of communication and computation. Through the use of the Guest Virtual Machine ID (GVMI) firmware used in BlueField DPUs (targeting more efficient transfer of data between the host server and DPU through the DPUs memory subsystem), we showcase the scalability and efficiency of our designs on both BlueField-2 and BlueField-3 SmartNICs, gaining up to 99x performance improvements in kernels leveraging 1SC primitives, such as Block Sparse Matrix Multiplication.

---

Contributors:

• Benjamin Michalowicz
• Kaushik Kandadi Suresh
• Prof. Hari Subramoni
• Steve Poole