LinuxCon + CloudOpen + ContainerCon NA 2015

Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) technology allows applications to conduct GB-size memory transfers across a cluster with negligible CPU utilization, and exchange messages at sub micro-second latencies. Consequently, RDMA is a core enabler for High-Performance Computing (HPC), big data analytics, and storage. To provide this degree of performance, RDMA NICs expose the transport resources directly to user applications; the OS kernel is not involved in the data path. Yet, containing applications that directly access RDMA resources is feasible.

In this session, we describe how RDMA technology is made available for contained applications. Specifically, we describe how RDMA services are bound to network namespaces, and how to control the usage of the bounded HW resources and provide isolation between containers. Various configuration options would be covered, for both Ethernet and Infiniband networks. The introduction of container support for RDMA paves the way for a new class of high-performance applications, that leverage both the scale and agility of containers and the extreme performance of RDMA.