Note: This project is under active development. Documentation is being continuously updated.

Axio BF3 Express is a high-performance execution platform for NVIDIA BlueField 3 DPUs. It enables users to run application DAGs with pipeline parallelism to achieve optimal throughput (up to 400Gbps in ideal conditions). The platform provides comprehensive programmability across the entire stack, including:

• Reconfigurable match-action engines
• Data path accelerators (DPAs)
• On-board SoC
• ASIC-based accelerators

Axio BF3 Express uses a kernel and wrapper programming model, similar to GPU programming. The model consists of two main components:

1. Kernels: Function binaries that correspond to application DAG nodes
2. Specification File: Defines:
   • Target DPU component for each kernel
   • Inter-function dependencies (representing DAG edges)

The platform encapsulates each DAG node into a wrapper, which manages the corresponding kernel binary for parallel execution.

• Intel® Xeon® Gold 6530 Processor
• Two-port 400GbE BlueField 3, PCIe 5.0 x 16
• Host Memory: 512GB DDR5 3200MT/s
• DPU Memory: 32GB DDR5 5200MT/s

• Ubuntu 22.04
• Linux kernel 5.15.x
• DPDK 22.11.x
• NVIDIA DOCA 2.9.2

Axio BF3 Express depends on NVIDIA DOCA, open vswitch, and rdma-core. Please make sure DOCA has been installed, while others can be installed by running the following commands:

# Clone the repository with submodules
git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/axio-project/axio-bf3-express.git

# Install required packages
sudo apt-get install binutils-dev meson nlohmann-json3-dev libyara-dev

1. Build the Axio BF3 Express library (includes kernel wrapper compilation):

# Clean build
bash build.sh -t lib -e rdma_simple -c

# Build library
bash build.sh -t lib -e rdma_simple

2. Build the runtime environment:

# Clean build
bash build.sh -t runtime -c

# Build runtime
bash build.sh -t runtime

Axio BF3 Express handles RDMA traffic (RC mode) and is compatible with any RDMA application. The following example uses Axio-emulator to generate RDMA traffic. For more details about Axio-emulator, please refer to the Axio-emulator documentation.

Remote Host (Axio-emulator) -> Local BF3 (Axio BF3 Express) -> Local Host (Axio-emulator)

1. On Local Host:

sudo ./build/axio > tmp/temp.log

2. On Local BF3 SoC:

sudo ./runtime/build/runtime/nicc_runtime

3. On Remote Host:

sudo ./build/axio > tmp/temp.log

The offloaded DAG in the RDMA simple example follows this workflow:

1. DPA core receives RDMA requests and stores them in DPA memory
2. Requests are sent to a SoC core for processing
3. SoC core redirects requests to local host through local RDMA
4. Local Axio-emulator echoes back requests through: local BF3 SoC -> local BF3 DPA -> remote host