In this episode, we scrutinize the performance of the Bluefield-2 SmartNIC in our two-node cluster deployed at Cloudlab. We had quite a bumpy road in reaching this point, but we finally did it. If you missed the former parts, read Part I. to know how to install the necessary drivers; read Part II to see how DPDK can be installed, and read Part III to see how the environment we further work in can be achieved in Cloudlab.

As a quick recap, the topology we use is shown below. Two servers are connected via three links. Two of them practically wires the two ports of the Bluefield SmartNICs, while the third uses the other smartNIC (with a non-capitalized ‘s’) port. The latter is only to force Cloudlab to indeed connect the Bluefields.