Werkstudententätigkeiten

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).

The open-nic hardware platform is accompanied by an
open-source Linux driver for proper integration into the
Linux networking subsystem. While this driver provides the basic features for receiving and sending packets, it lacks more advanced features for improved performance, such as eBPF hooks for XDP and zero-copy mechanisms like AF_XDP.

The goal of this work is to extend the open-nic-driver with support for XDP and AF_XDP. This requires implementing the additional hooks and interfaces to low-level Linux subsystems, as well as maintaining all functionality of a typical network device and interaction with the hardware. Further, the performance of these mechanisms should be evaluated and compared to the standard driver.

Voraussetzungen

At LIS we want to use the Duckietown hardware and software ecosystem for experimenting with our reinforcement learning based learning classifier tables (LCT) as part of the control system of the Duckiebots: https://www.ce.cit.tum.de/lis/forschung/aktuelle-projekte/duckietown-lab/

More information on Duckietown can be found on https://www.duckietown.org/.

Towards this goal, we need a (followup) working student who is improving the current infrastructure.

Towards this goal, the following three major tasks are necessary:

1. Developping an infrastructure to track and visualize measurement data of the platform (e.g. CPU utilization) as well as the executed application.
2. During this task also the source and periodicity of already provided data should be analyzed.
3. Setting up all Duckiebots incl. all their features and a pipeline to reflash them in case it's needed.
4. FPGA-Extension: Searching for a concept, as well as implementing it.
5. Final goal: demonstration of data exchange between NVIDIA Jetson and FPGA including protocol to specify the type of transfered data