DPU-Bench: A Micro-Benchmark Suite to Measure Offload Efficiency Of SmartNICs.

Smart Network Interface Cards (SmartNIC) have experienced massive growth in popularity over the last few years such as the NVIDIA BlueField-2 Data Processing Unit (DPU). Being equipped with their own set of cores and memory allows them to perform actions beyond a regular NIC, and HPC researchers are designing new ways to use them. For example, offloading communication to one enables the CPU "host" to perform more computationally heavy tasks. However, one question remains: How much of that work can be distributed among processes placed on the SmartNIC before facing performance degradation? We present DPU-Bench: A low-level micro-benchmark suite using IB-Verbs primitives to enable HPC users to examine the number of processes to be placed on one or more SmartNICs in order to efficiently offload a given communication pattern. We examine direct algorithms in this paper at a medium scale with different work assignment mechanisms and give insights into the trends found with varying numbers of worker processes and message sizes.