Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
AI and HPC systems
rack-scale integration
software development
hardware access
resource dependency
Cnuas: A Software-Defined AI/HPC Rack-scale Emulation Platform and Hyperscale Data Center Facility Twin
🤖 AI Summary
该论文介绍了Cnuas，一个通过功能仿真解决AI/HPC系统软件开发对昂贵硬件依赖问题的开源平台。
📝 Abstract
Modern AI and HPC systems integrate accelerators, high-speed networks, and management controllers at rack scale. Developing software for this infrastructure typically requires access to scarce, costly hardware, while software abstractions can obscure how workloads depend on resources across servers and accelerators. This paper presents Cnuas, an open-source, experimental rack-scale emulation platform whose baseline architecture follows the Open Compute Project (OCP) Open Rack v3 specifications. Through functional emulation, it supports experimentation, learning and software development within academic and industrial research and development, rather than matching the throughput or latency of physical hardware. Its web-based user interface visualizes racks, devices and their interconnections to help developers build a system-level mental model of the infrastructure supporting their workloads. At its core, CnuasNIC and CnuasSwitch implement a guest-visible remote direct memory access (RDMA) adapter and a host-resident hybrid software switch supporting both RoCEv2 and native InfiniBand. The platform also provides a dedicated AI/ML accelerator (GPU) peer fabric and OpenBMC-based rack management with executable power supply and battery backup firmware over RS-485. These components support the study of device, driver, and firmware interfaces on commodity hosts. The accelerator software stack remains an early research prototype, and facility modeling with OpenUSD is an exploratory extension. The paper presents the architecture, interfaces, and bounded prototype results as a basis for community collaboration across the core platform and its extensions.
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
rack-scale emulation
remote direct memory access (RDMA)
hybrid software switch
AI/ML accelerator
OpenBMC
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