Storage Virtualization and HW-agnostic Acceleration using IPDK and xPU

Local disk emulation using domain-specific hardware poses a great opportunity for innovation in the storage domain. Standard host-side drivers like NVMe or virtio-blk and legacy applications can be enabled to access disaggregated storage at scale using state-of-art protocols like NVMe-oTCP while increasing performance through offload of storage services to the hardware (SmartNIC/DPU/IPU/xPU). In this talk, we present how IPDK, an open-source, vendor-agnostic framework of drivers and APIs for infrastructure offload and management can be used to dynamically create multiple virtual storage devices which a tenant uses to access a remote storage target using standard para-virtualized host-side virtio-blk or NVMe drivers. The attendees will learn how they can use IPDK to exercise the above scenario in a fully containerized environment using KVM-based IPU simulation suitable for rapid prototyping and then run their use cases on accelerated platforms. To demonstrate the HW-agnosticism of the solution we will show how the exact same host-side SW-stack used for prototyping can be used with a real HW-accelerated FPGA-based SmartNIC or an ASIC-based IPU.