CLIENT PROFILE
Silicon Valley-based Fungible, the world’s premier dynamic composable infrastructure company, creates solutions to cloudify the world’s data centers by utilizing the Fungible DPU™ to connect CPUs, GPUs, and storage via NVMe/TCP over standard IP/Ethernet networks. Fungible aims to revolutionize the performance, economics, reliability, and security of scale-out data centers.
PROJECT GOAL
To demonstrate Fungible solution’s performance in large-scale configurations including the tangible economic benefits it can provide for data center clients, the goal of the project was to design and develop the DASH control plane software for the DASH VNet-to-VNet feature on Fungible DPU as a PoC.
Fungible DPU provides powerful datacentric processing capabilities and software programmability that allows the DPU to be programmed for complex software defined networking policies in any highly scaled cloud network. DASH (Disaggregated APIs for SONiC Hosts) is an emerging approach to management of networking appliances in data centers, initiated by Microsoft and spun off by the SONiC community. DASH APIs are built on SAI (Switch Abstraction Interface), and DASH control plane software inherits SONiC’s architecture and key components enabling flexibility and scalability for DPU technologies.
BUSINESS CHALLENGES
SONiC-DASH, as an emerging technology, has a significant development challenge due to its high level of uncertainty and the absence of proven and defined standards. Therefore, its development approach and the solution itself must be quickly adjusted on the go. In addition, there is a lack of relevant expertise on the market. The open-source nature of DASH requires alignment with the community during the introduction of new product platforms.
To deliver a DASH-based prototype, Fungible needed to work with a reliable software partner capable of enabling its DPU solution for DASH. An established brand in the industry, PLVision is a software product development company focused on open networking. Its years of experience with SAI and SONiC, community involvement and in-depth knowledge of various ASIC SDKs have provided the company with a solid foundation for early DASH exploration.
TECHNICAL HIGHLIGHTS
Optimized VNet Enablement
PLVision’s focus on the PoC scope to enable a fundamental VNet-to-VNet use case allowed for the minimization of the number of SAI APIs required for the delivery of the DASH demo. This also translated into clear requirements for the DPU SDK for Fungible’s development team to be supported by DPU software stack for DASH implementation.
Speed-to-Performance Advantage
Fungible’s family of DPUs’ ease of programming through the C language quickly enabled the implementation of DASH packet processing pipelines for stateful flow processing running at line rate traffic, processing millions of packets per second.
Pathway to SONiC Integration
The successful PoC led the way to solid DASH and SAI design, revealing areas for improvement at the SDK level and overall software stack optimization, thereby laying the foundation for further SONiC control plane bring-up and verification.
SAI Thrift Integration
The SAI Thrift interface was integrated to validate the solution in a constrained environment, which involves testing without the SONiC control plane in place.
Business Result
PLVision integrated fundamental DASH components with Fungible DPU products. For the core part of this implementation, we implemented DASH SAI library on top of DPU SDK. The delivered PoC provided excellent demonstration capabilities for Fungible’s platform. The project outcomes confirmed the feasibility of Fungible’s DASH solution based on its DPU. This draft DASH implementation created an environment for prototyping, demo, and testing, unlocking opportunities to extend DPU applications in the hyperscale DC market.
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