qiangsu97 / meili

Meili

Meili is a novel system that features SmartNIC as a service to address issues in the current offloading paradigms, including

• Poor cluster-wide resource efficiency
• Inflexible SmartNIC management
• Inflexible application deployment

by organizing heterogeneous NIC resources as a pool and offering a unified one-NIC abstraction to application developers. This allows

• developers to focus solely on the application logic while dynamically specifying their performance targets.
• operators, now with complete visibility over the SmartNIC cluster, are able to flexibly consolidate applications for overall resource efficiency.

In particular, Meili provides a flexible modular programming model, a scalable data plane, and a unified control plane.

Open-sourcing Schedule

Currently we have released our key components of Meili, including

• Programming model with APIs for
  • Packet processing
  • Socket processing
  • Accelerator function
• Scalable data plane pipeline
• Unified control plane
  • Application orchestration

More to be released in the next stage.

Environment

Our cluster comprises:

• Mellanox SN2700 32-Port switch
• NVIDIA BlueField-2 SmartNICs
• NVIDIA BlueField-1 100GbE SmartNICs
• AMD Pensando SmartNICs
• Client servers
  • 32 cores AMD EPYC-7542 CPU @ 2.9 GHz
  • 256 GB of DRAM
  • One NVIDIA ConnectX-6 100GbE NIC (MT28908)

Software configurations:

• DPDK: 20.11.5
• Traffic generator: DPDK-Pktgen 23.03.1

Compile & Run

make
bash ./run.sh -live 2 10

The above step will start Meili using 2 cores and run the sample program in src/example/ (the program in paper Listing 1) for 10 seconds.

Repo Structure

• rulesets/ contains rulesets we use for regex accelerator on Bluefield-2 SmartNICs.
• src/ contains source code of Meili.
• traffic_generator/ contains sample traffic generation script and pcaps.