Offloading NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) to SmartNICs on an at-scale Distributed Testbed

The landscape of cloud deployments has surged, evolving into a cornerstone for modern infrastructures. However, with this advancement, a key challenge remains: general-purpose CPUs perform infrastructure functions of the cloud deployments, i.e., storage, security, and networking. SmartNICs have emerged as a transformative solution, integrating specialized processing capabilities with the help of processing cores and accelerators directly on the NIC hardware. These intelligent adapters offload and accelerate infrastructure functions, enhancing throughput, reducing latency, and alleviating the burdens on host CPUs. Their ability to handle complex networking, storage, and security tasks at line speed revolutionizes cloud deployments, optimizing resource utilization and enabling seamless scalability while mitigating the performance bottlenecks encountered with conventional NICs. In this paper, we explore offloading NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) to SmartNIC. We present an experimental design on the FABRIC testbed to perform NVMe-oF by offloading it to a SmartNIC. Our overall goal is to compare CPU performance with and without offloading, benchmark SmartNIC over a regular NIC, and estimate CPU cycle savings.