Meet Canonical at SmartNICs Summit 2023

SmartNICs, the programmable network adapters that make data centre networking, security and storage efficient, scalable and modular, have started to play a significant role in the industry. Combining traditional NIC capabilities with advanced processing power, smartNICs allow many infrastructure capabilities to be offloaded from CPU, thus enabling CPU to focus on useful application  workloads which can yield significant savings for enterprise data centres.  Canonical believes that SmartNICs are an integral part of cloud infrastructure and we work with partners to integrate our cutting-edge products, such as Ubuntu, MAAS, Charmed Openstack, and Charmed Kubernetes with smartNICs to deliver value to the customers and the industry.

Join Canonical at the second SmartNICs Summit in San Jose, California from June 13-15  to connect with engineers and managers who are interested in this field. 

As a leading sponsor we are excited to present the panel discussion and share our insights in the software track.

C-102: Panel on Next Great Breakthrough in SmartNICs (Panel Track)

Wednesday, June 14th, 2023, 3:10 p.m. – 4:10 p.m.

Moderator: Roy Chua, Principal, AvidThink

Panel Members:

Panelist: Jon Sreekanth, Architect, Achronix

Panelist: Eric Hibbard, Director Product Planning – Security, Samsung Semiconductor

Panelist: Frode Nordahl, Senior Engineer, Canonical

Description: Many major changes will surely occur in the emerging SmartNIC arena. They include the addition of standard slots for GPUs and DPUs, faster processors, more canned applications (perhaps available via an app store), more standards, better operating system support, and greater use of processors other than Arm cores. Other possible advances could include the integration of on-board optics, higher frequency versions of Ethernet, the use of persistent memory, and the use of higher-speed interfaces such as CXL. A new form factor with a large power budget (such as the one suggested by SNIA) would be welcome as well.

B-103: Provisioning and Commissioning a DPU at the Bare-Metal Level (Software Track)

Wednesday, June 14th, 2023, 4:20 p.m. – 5:20 p.m.

Presenters:

Bjorn Tillenius, Senior Engineer, Canonical

Frode Nordahl, Senior Engineer, Canonical

Session description:

Operating systems play a large role in SmartNIC applications. The SmartNIC or DPU needs an operating system to run applications, but most Linux distributions are very large and contain features not used in devices that have a simple run-time environment. One solution is to use a minimal kernel specially designed for such situations. Another approach is to employ a bare-metal (unshared) server that dispenses with virtualization (no hypervisor).

The Canonical Table & Team

Canonical is inviting customers and partners to explore our trusted and secure software products for SmartNICs. We will present a few demos to showcase our solutions in smartNICs.

• Networking offload onto smartNICs: Charmed Openstack solution from Canonical enables offloading of both network control(OVN) and data plane(OVS) onto smartNICs. 

• Provisioning of DPU: Canonical bare metal provisioning service MAAS enables provisioning of DPU/smartNICs.

• Infrastructure solution: Canonical LXD enables virtualization on smartNICs along with the host machines thus allowing workloads to be easily migrated from host to smartNICs.

Visit Canonical at table 16 and discuss your organisation’s networking needs with our smartNIC experts.

Explore more with us at SmartNICs Summit!