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| Hauptverfasser: | , , , , , , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2025
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| Online-Zugang: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13997 |
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| _version_ | 1866908544322764800 |
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| author | Zhu, Yu Dhakal, Aditya Bruel, Pedro Rattihalli, Gourav Xiao, Yunming Lombardi, Johann Milojicic, Dejan |
| author_facet | Zhu, Yu Dhakal, Aditya Bruel, Pedro Rattihalli, Gourav Xiao, Yunming Lombardi, Johann Milojicic, Dejan |
| contents | AI training and inference impose sustained, fine-grain I/O that stresses host-mediated, TCP-based storage paths. Motivated by kernel-bypass networking and user-space storage stacks, we revisit POSIX-compatible object storage for GPU-centric pipelines. We present ROS2, an RDMA-first object storage system design that offloads the DAOS client to an NVIDIA BlueField-3 SmartNIC while leaving the DAOS I/O engine unchanged on the storage server. ROS2 separates a lightweight control plane (gRPC for namespace and capability exchange) from a high-throughput data plane (UCX/libfabric over RDMA or TCP) and removes host mediation from the data path.
Using FIO/DFS across local and remote configurations, we find that on server-grade CPUs RDMA consistently outperforms TCP for both large sequential and small random I/O. When the RDMA-driven DAOS client is offloaded to BlueField-3, end-to-end performance is comparable to the host, demonstrating that SmartNIC offload preserves RDMA efficiency while enabling DPU-resident features such as multi-tenant isolation and inline services (e.g., encryption/decryption) close to the NIC. In contrast, TCP on the SmartNIC lags host performance, underscoring the importance of RDMA for offloaded deployments.
Overall, our results indicate that an RDMA-first, SmartNIC-offloaded object-storage stack is a practical foundation for scaling data delivery in modern LLM training environments; integrating optional GPU-direct placement for LLM tasks is left for future work. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_13997 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | An RDMA-First Object Storage System with SmartNIC Offload Zhu, Yu Dhakal, Aditya Bruel, Pedro Rattihalli, Gourav Xiao, Yunming Lombardi, Johann Milojicic, Dejan Hardware Architecture AI training and inference impose sustained, fine-grain I/O that stresses host-mediated, TCP-based storage paths. Motivated by kernel-bypass networking and user-space storage stacks, we revisit POSIX-compatible object storage for GPU-centric pipelines. We present ROS2, an RDMA-first object storage system design that offloads the DAOS client to an NVIDIA BlueField-3 SmartNIC while leaving the DAOS I/O engine unchanged on the storage server. ROS2 separates a lightweight control plane (gRPC for namespace and capability exchange) from a high-throughput data plane (UCX/libfabric over RDMA or TCP) and removes host mediation from the data path. Using FIO/DFS across local and remote configurations, we find that on server-grade CPUs RDMA consistently outperforms TCP for both large sequential and small random I/O. When the RDMA-driven DAOS client is offloaded to BlueField-3, end-to-end performance is comparable to the host, demonstrating that SmartNIC offload preserves RDMA efficiency while enabling DPU-resident features such as multi-tenant isolation and inline services (e.g., encryption/decryption) close to the NIC. In contrast, TCP on the SmartNIC lags host performance, underscoring the importance of RDMA for offloaded deployments. Overall, our results indicate that an RDMA-first, SmartNIC-offloaded object-storage stack is a practical foundation for scaling data delivery in modern LLM training environments; integrating optional GPU-direct placement for LLM tasks is left for future work. |
| title | An RDMA-First Object Storage System with SmartNIC Offload |
| topic | Hardware Architecture |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13997 |