ishank-arora/tas-smartnic

BlueTAS

Built on top of TAS.

BlueTAS is an implementation of offloading the fast and slow path of TAS from the CPU of the host machine to the cores of a SmartNIC.

Here is our report the details BlueTAS' functionality.

Overview

The repo consists of three main components - lib, tas_host and tas_nic. The interaction between the three and the application can be summarized in the following figure:

------------------        --------------    |    -------------
|  App  | libTAS |  <==>  |  tas_host  |  <=|=>  |  tas_nic  |
------------------        --------------    |    -------------
                    HOST                    |         NIC

lib consists of the application interface which is needed to be preloaded as a shared object when running any application.
tas_host is the part of the TAS stack that is implemented to be run on the host - specifically, it houses the implementatio to connect and flush to the RDMA queues on the NIC.
tas_nic is the fast and slow path of TAS that runs on the NIC.

How to build

On the host, the only folders that need to be made are the lib/ and tas_host folders. For convenience, we provide a modified Makefile which accounts for that. So, on the host, run:

$ make -f MakefileHost

On the SmartNic, we simply just build all the folders. Assuming that dpdk is installed in ~/dpdk-inst TAS can be built as follows:

$ make RTE_SDK=~/dpdk-inst

How to run

Some definitions: A host refers to the main compute machine on which applications are run. Inside the host, there is a SmartNIC. We can run applications on SmartNIC too.

BlueTAS Setup

So, on the host, we run:

$ arp -s [IP_address_of_SmartNIC] [MAC_address_of_SmartNIC]
$ tas_host/tas_host

On the SmartNIC, we run:

$ sudo tas_nic/tas_nic --ip-addr=10.0.0.170/24 --fp-cores-max=2 --nic-ip=10.0.0.170 --nic-port=39244 --shm-len=536870912

where 10.0.0.170 is the ip-address of the smartNIC.

Run

To run an application using TAS, we run

$ LD_PRELOAD=lib/libtas_interpose.so application_binary application_args