Paper Title: Using SONiC-DASH to Create Ultra-High-Speed Cloud Switches

Paper Abstract: The emergence of large international clouds that perform a large part of computation worldwide has led to the need for equipment that can support a wide variety of applications at cloud scale. Operators need a programmable way to manage traffic flows at high speed to meet their SLAs. Furthermore, the current traditional Host-NIC deployments cannot provide high enough first connection setup speeds because of CPU involvement. SmartNICs or IPUs can free up CPUs and offload network functions at high speeds with inline acceleration. The results are in-hardware first connection setup at high speed and optimal flow management of application traffic. A new addition to SONiC – Disaggregated APIs for SONiC Hosts (DASH) -- defines the APIs and policies for packet processing for cloud infrastructure, extending SONiC to edge devices such as SmartNICs, appliances, and SmartSwitches. A SmartSwitch consists of multiple IPUs and a switch ASIC. It not only offloads the server, freeing up compute, but it also handles the switching with reduced latency, lower costs, and greater flexibility. A SmartSwitch utilizing SONiC-DASH can achieve 10x to 100x first connections scale increase. It can also provide the infrastructure for multiple use models that can sit on top of a DASH pipeline such as service chaining, hyperconverged infrastructure, and colocation.

Paper Author: Reshma Sudarshan, Director of Applications Engineering, Intel

Author Bio: Reshma Sudarshan is currently Director of Application Engineering at Intel. She specializes in network OSes and applications with a focus on programmability and SDN. Her recent work involves adding features to SONiC such as PINS (P4 Integrated Network Stack) which adds SDN and P4 capabilities. She has also been working on standardized packet programming methods for the DASH open source community and unifying management across switch and NIC with the SONiC single NOS strategy. Before joining Intel, she was a software engineering manager at Extreme Networks, Brocade Communication Systems, and Foundry Networks. She studied computer science at UC Irvine and Karnatak University (India). She holds 4 patents and has applied for 4 more. She has also presented at the P4 Workshop.