FMS: Chelsio to Demo 7th Gen T7 DPU Emulation Platform

Chelsio Communications, Inc. had demonstratred the T7 DPU emulation platform at FMS.

The T7 DPU emulation platform supports a 5U chassis that connects to a server host via a PCIe ribbon cable. It includes a mapping of all T7 logic gates, supports the Linux boot process for running applications, and the host software of T7 predecessors, T5 and T6, as-is, thus demonstrating the ability of customers to leverage prior software investment. T7 emulation platform delivers an aggregate of 40GbE aggregate bandwidth via 4x10GbE or 2x40GbE connectivity options. The T7 emulation platform for software development is available to company’s T7 Early Access customers.

The T7 emulation platform validates T6 software operation on T7 to enable a high degree confidence in a continued first silicon to production experience similar to earlier generation T5 and T6 ASICs.

During FMS, the firm demonstrated the following T7 emulation platform capabilities that illustrate how T7 adapter and ASIC solutions offer high-speed Ethernet storage networking complement solid state storage technologies in the company’s booth:

• 100G kernel and user space NVMe/TCP using Chelsio TOE for low-latency access to NVMe SSD storage. 

• iWARP RDMA for enabling NVMe-oFs-based network access with high-performance and low latency. 

• iSCSI protocol offload-based access to flash storage with high throughput and IO/s. 

• Chelsio TCP Offload Engine (TOE) which offloads the processing of TCP/IP protocol stack from the server host for high-performance, low overhead network communications. 

• NVMe/TCP with firm’s TOE using the protocol data unit (PDU) interface for low-latency access to NVMe SSD storage. 

• Memory-free server offload functions optimized for datacenter networking applications. 

• T6 legacy mode software running on T7 for iSCSI, iWARP, TOE, NIC, NVMe/TCP. 

“T7 embodies a major leap in the level of functionality of our products and provides a generalized solution for our OEM partners in the cloud, server and storage markets for fully addressing the challenges of efficient data processing and movement with the confidence of having several generations of offload products in production,” stated Kianoosh Naghshineh, CEO, Chelsio.

“The Chelsio T7 DPU is a new type of I/O processor optimized to process data-centric workloads offloading server CPU overhead of software-defined networking, storage, security and other cloud-native services while boosting application performance,” said Greg Schulz, senior analyst server, StorageIO. “The T7 Emulation Platform is a milestone in broad-based deployment of Chelsio T7 DPU.“

Availability:

• The T7 DPU Emulation Platform for software development is available to early access customers.

• T7 DPU ASICs will be sampling in 4Q22 and, similar to T5 and T6, and is expected to be in production on first silicon within one quarter.