Marco Liess, M.Sc.

With the advent of research on the next generation of
mobile communications 6G, we are engaged in exploring
architecture extensions for Smart Network Interface Cards
(SmartNICs). To enable adaptive, energy-efficient and
low-latency network interfaces, we are prototyping a
custom packet processing pipeline on FPGA-based NICs,
partially based on the open-nic project
(https://github.com/Xilinx/open-nic).

Load balancing is a challenging task in modern data
centers and servers, as the number of processing cores rises (96 cores in recent AMD Epyc platforms) and the packet processing workload should be distributed equally among them. To assist this process, incoming packet flows should be differentiated and assigned to different queues already in the NIC hardware. These queues must then be pinned to different processor cores to ensure the hardware load-balancing algorithm works correctly. Further, interrupts and other sources of imbalances necessitate a feedback mechanism, to ensure the current capacity of individual cores is taken into account.

The goal of this work is to implement the required software driver and runtime extensions to an existing SmartNIC-based load balancing mechanism. In detail, this includes configuring the NIC driver to use the correct queues, pinning the processing of the queues onto different CPU cores and creating a feedback mechanism to the load balancer in the SmartNIC. Further, functional verification as well as performance evaluation should be done on the system.

Prerequisites

In modern Edge computer networks, applications and services should adhere to service-level agreements (SLA) like low latency or minimal throughput. Depending on demand and resource availability, these services have to be migrated between compute nodes to ensure these SLAs.

Service migration is a critical aspect of Edge computing, enabling the movement of services closer to the data source or end-users for improved performance and reduced latency. However, it comes with its own set of challenges, such as maintaining service continuity and managing resource constraints. This involves checkpointing and restarting of the applications (potentially in containers), as well as moving the data from one compute node to the other. This data movement could be further improved with RDMA technology.

This seminar should provide a background overview of the required technologies for service migration and explore recent improvements for low-latency service migration in both hardware and software.

These papers are an interesting starting point for your literature research:
- https://ieeexplore-ieee-org.eaccess.tum.edu/abstract/document/10643902
- https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc21/presentation/planeta

In modern Edge computer networks, applications and services should adhere to service-level agreements (SLA) like low latency or minimal throughput. Depending on demand and resource availability, these services have to be migrated between compute nodes to ensure these SLAs.

Service migration is a critical aspect of Edge computing, enabling the movement of services closer to the data source or end-users for improved performance and reduced latency. However, it comes with its own set of challenges, such as maintaining service continuity and managing resource constraints. This involves checkpointing and restarting of the applications (potentially in containers), as well as moving the data from one compute node to the other. This data movement could be further improved with RDMA technology.

This seminar should provide a background overview of the required technologies for service migration and explore recent improvements for low-latency service migration in both hardware and software.