Falcon: A Reliable, Low Latency Hardware Transport
dl.acm.org
dl.acm.org
If you want encrypted transport, then all you need is a parallel hardware crypto accelerator so you do not bottleneck on slow serial CPU encryption.
If you want to keep it off the memory bus, then all you need is a hardware copy/DMA engine so you do not bottleneck on slow CPU serial memcpy().
Doing a whole new bespoke network protocol in hardware seems like overkill if you are only going for 800 Gb/s.
The results sections speaks clearly to their wins. A tiny drop rate or pre-order rate causes enormous goodput losses for RoCE. Falcon hardly notices. P99 latencies go to 7x slowdown over ideal at a 500 connections for RoCE versus 1.5x slowdown for Falcon. Falcon recovers from disruption way faster, whereas RoCE struggles to find goodput. Multipath shows major wins for effective load.
If you don't care about p99, and you don't have many connections, yeah, what we have today is fine. But this is divinely awesome stability when doing absurdly brutal things to the connection. And it all works in hostile/contested multi-tenancy environments. And it exposes friendly fast APIs like NVMe or RDMA directly (covering much of the space that AWS Nitro does).
It is also wildly amazing how they implemented this. Not as its own NIC but by surrounding a Intel E2100 200gbps NIC with their own ASIC.
The related works section makes comparisons versus other best of breed and emerging systems. Worth reading that to see more of what wins were had here.
The NIC's job these days is to keep very expensive very hot accelerators screaming along at their jobs. Wasting with congestion and retransmits and growing p99 latencies costs incredible wastes of capacity, time, and power. Falcon radically improves the ability of traffic to make successful transit. That keeps those many kilowatts of accelerators on track with the data and results they need to keep crunching.
I am saying that a properly designed and implemented software network protocol gets you similar capabilities to the stated capabilities of Falcon. As such, while the feature set is not bad and the throughput is fine, it is not a very unique feature set or impressive throughput absent some sort of cost or power efficiency of doing it in hardware which I saw no mention of in the paper.
It's not entirely, but even that would be a justifiable reason. Tail behavior of all sorts matters a lot, sophisticated congestion control and load-balancing matters a lot. ML training is all about massive collectives: a single tail latency event in a NCCL collective means all GPUs in that group are idling until the last GPU makes it.
> It only takes like 1 core to terminate 200 Gb/s of reliable bytestream using a software protocol with no hardware offload over regular old 1500-byte MTU ethernet.
The conventional TCP/IP stack is a lot more than just 20GB/s of memcpy's with 200 GbE: there's a DMA into kernel buffers and then a copy into user memory, there's syscalls and interrupts and back and forth, there's segmentation and checksums and reassembly and retransmits, and overall a lot more work. RDMA eliminates all that.
> all you need is a parallel hardware crypto accelerator > all you need is a hardware copy/DMA engine
And when you add these and all the other requirements you get a modern RDMA network :).
The network is what kicks in when Moore's law recedes. Jensen Huang wants you to pretend that your 10,000 GPUs are one massive GPU: that only works if you have Nvlink/Infiniband or something in that league, and even then barely. And GOOG/MSFT/AMZN are too big and the datacenter fabric is too precious to be outsourced.
Hardware crypto acceleration and a hardware memory copy engine do not constitute a RDMA engine. The API I am describing is the receiver programming into a device a (address, length) chunk of data to decrypt and a (src, dst, length) chunk of data to move, respectively. That is a far cry from a whole hardware network protocol.
You also suggested that this can be done using a single CPU core. It seems to me that this proposal involves custom APIs (not sockets), and even if viable with a single core in the common case, would blow up in case of loss/recovery/retransmission events. Falcon provides a mostly lossless fabric with loss/retransmits/recovery taken care of by the fabric: the host CPU never handles any of these tail cases.
Ultimately there are two APIs for networks: sockets and verbs. Former is great for simplicity, compatibility, and portability, and the latter is the standard for when you are willing to break compatibility for performance.
You can use such a protocol as a simple write() and read() to a single bytestream if you so desire, though you would probably be better off using a better API to avoid that unnecessary copy. Usage does not need to be anymore complicated then using a TCP socket which also provides a reliable ordered bytestream abstraction. You make bytes go in, same bytes come out the other side.
Just the idea that using a bytestream is ok is leaving opportunity on the table. If you know what protocols you are sending, you can allow some out-of-order transmission.
Asking the kernel or dpdk or whatever to juggle contention sounds like a coherency nightmare on large scale system, is a very hard scheduling problem, that a hardware timing wheel is going to be able to just do. Getting reliability & stability at massive concurrency at low latencies feels like such an obvious place for hardware to shine, and it does here.
Maybe you can dedicate some cores of your system to maintain a low enough latency simulacra maybe, but you'd still have to shuffle all the data through those low latency cores, which itself takes time and system bandwidth. Leaving the work to hardware with its own buffers & own scheduling seems like an obviously good use of hardware. Especially with the incredibly exact delay based congestion control their close cycle timing feedback gives them: you can act way before the CPU would poll/interrupt again.
Then having own Upper-Level-Protocol processors offloads a ton more of the hard work these applications need.
You don't seem curious or interested at all. You seem like you are here to downput and belittle. There's so many amazing wins in so many dimensions here, where the NIC can do very smart things intelligently, can specialize and respond with enormous speed. I'd challenge you to try just a bit to see some upsides to specialization, versus just saying a CPU hypothetically can do everything (and where is the research showing what p99 latency the best of breed software stacks can do?).
However, people like yourself talk about these hardware stacks as if they have clear advantages in performance and latency and isolation. They make uncurious and dismissive comments without evidence that this level of results is only achievable with dedicated hardware.
The only consistent conclusion I can come up with is that everybody just uses really bad software stacks which makes these dedicated hardware solutions seem like major improvements when they are just demonstrating performance you should expect out of your software stack. The fact that this is considered a serious improvement over RoCE which is itself viewed as a serious improvement over things like the Linux kernel TCP software stack lends support for my conclusion.
I make comments on various posts about network protocols to see if I am missing something about the problem space that actually makes it hard to do efficiently in a software protocol. Mostly I just get people parroting the claim that a performant software solution is impossible due to easily solved problems like loss/recovery/retransmission instead of actually indicating hard parts of the problem.
And as for what would be useful hardware I would go with a network with full 64K MTU and hardware copy offload with HBM or other fast bus. Then you could pretty comfortably drive ~10 Tb/s per core subject to enough memory/bus bandwidth.
I'd love to run off Google Falcon versus say Microsoft's Machnet. There's a ton of system resources dedicated to making machnet and dpdk fast, it comes with huge design tradeoffs & specially carefully crafted software architectures. Extreme software engineering effort. The glory of Falcon is that you don't need to rebuild your app stack from the bottom up like this: you're just going to get blitz fast insane utilization with incredibly low p99 for free from the system you have. https://github.com/microsoft/machnet
I think you massively over-glorify the software side of things. There is a ton of potential absolutely to very carefully setup systems to get great goodput, no degredation. But it usually requires carefully built systems & eternal vigilance in how you scale your software across cores. Or you could just have some hardware that routes replies directly to the place it needs to go. I don't get what feels like a weird fetishization you have with doing it in software, and it feels like you don't have any rigor about your criticism/can't cite any backing research/want to accuse everyone else of being super lazy.