A DPU Solution for Container Overlay Networks

TL;DR

This paper proposes a DPU-based offloading solution for container overlay networks to reduce overhead and improve performance in HPC environments, addressing current limitations of overlay networking.

Contribution

It introduces a novel DPU offloading approach for container overlay networks, enhancing performance by reducing host overhead in HPC settings.

Findings

Reduced network overhead on host nodes

Improved container network performance

Feasibility of DPU offloading demonstrated

Abstract

There is an increasing demand to incorporate hybrid environments as part of workflows across edge, cloud, and HPC systems. In a such converging environment of cloud and HPC, containers are starting to play a more prominent role, bringing their networking infrastructure along with them. However, the current body of work shows that container overlay networks, which are often used to connect containers across physical hosts, are ill-suited for the HPC environment. They tend to impose significant overhead and noise, resulting in degraded performance and disturbance to co-processes on the same host. This paper focuses on utilizing a novel class of hardware, Data Processing Unit, to offload the networking stack of overlay networks away from the host onto the DPU. We intend to show that such ancillary offload is possible and that it will result in decreased overhead on host nodes which in turn will improve the performance of running processes.