Paper Title: Provisioning and Commissioning a DPU at the Bare-Metal Level

Paper Abstract: Attaching a SmartNIC or DPU to a computer system today is no simple matter. Today’s virtualized environments do not permit easy access to physical components since their very purpose is to avoid the need to deal with physical configurations – the hypervisor takes care of such issues. One approach is to use a bare metal service, that is, a service that is dedicated to a single user and has no hypervisor. The process is still difficult. The network administrator must enlist the host machine in the service, build a custom image for the DPU, apply power management to ready the DPU for network boots, commission the DPU, and finally deploy a Linux distribution on the DPU. Going through the steps illustrates the complexity of handling the process without higher-level system software.

Paper Author: Bjorn Tillenius, Software Engineer, Canonical
Frode Nordahl, Sr Engineer, Canonical

Author Bio: Bjorn Tillenius is a senior software engineer at Canonical. He is a key developer for the Metal-as-a-Service (MAAS) bare-metal provisioning product. He has developed many major open source tools, such as the management tool Landscape and the software collaboration platform Launchpad. He has also provided extensive support for the Ubuntu operating system on public blogs and forums, including GitHub. He earned an MS in Computer Science from Linkoping University (Sweden).

Author 2 Bio: Bjorn Tillenius is a senior engineer in Canonical. He joined the company in 2005, and has been working on the company's MAAS product since 2017. His favourite programming language is Python.