The list of possible topics for the current academic year are the following (more can be added if needed):
Many hyperscalers now adopt "white box" switches in their datacenters, namely "no-well-known-name" switches powered by merchant silicon (e.g., Marvell, Broadcom, Intel), which appear to be competitive compared to the ones provided by traditional network manufactures (e.g., Cisco, Huawei, etc.). However, the "hardware" switch must be associated with an operating system: here, SONiC (driven by Microsoft) is becoming a solid alternative with a large number of supported switches.
This project aims at familiarizing with a SONiC-supported switch, the Edgecore DCS204 (formerly AS7726-32X), (1) installing the operating system, (2) testing the most common configurations (e.g., bridging, routing, VLANs), (3) understanding the level of programmability (e.g., turning on/off and configuring features through a software API instead of the command line) and (4) analyzing the level of integration with the Linux kernel, in terms of offloaded functions (e.g., routing/bridging configured with vanilla Linux command, while running on the hardware; packet capture with tcpdump, etc.), and in particular with respect to the eBPF subsystem.
Student: XXX; tutor: Davide Miola, Fulvio Risso
Networking hardware is rapidly evolving towards the Terabit-per-second era, bringing undeniable speedups in hardware-driven communication patterns in areas like High Performance Computing and AI training, where RDMA-based transports prevail. Meanwhile, traditional kernel network stacks fail to push throughput past single-digit Million packets per second (Mpps) per core, forcing a delicate balance between networking speed and processor utilization. Within this landscape, SmartNICs offering compute offload capabilities are being proposed as a possible means for accelerating the processing of networking tasks.
The project will investigate the effectiveness of offloading a full software network stack to the Nvidia BlueField 2 DPU; equipped with just 8xA72 ARM cores and a full Linux kernel on board, the student will explore userspace-based networking with VPP to extract as much performance as posible from the low-powered CPU. Is pulling every trick in software networking enough to make an embedded SoC competitive with a server processor?
Student: XXX; tutor: Davide Miola, Fulvio Risso