Closing the HPC-Cloud Convergence Gap: Multi-Tenant Slingshot RDMA for Kubernetes

Converged HPC-Cloud computing is an emerging computing paradigm that aims to support increasingly complex and multi-tenant scientific workflows. These systems require reconciliation of the isolation requirements of native cloud workloads and the performance demands of HPC applications. In this context, networking hardware is a critical boundary component: it is the conduit for high-throughput, low-latency communication and enables isolation across tenants. HPE Slingshot is a high-speed network interconnect that provides up to 200 Gbps of throughput per port and targets high-performance computing (HPC) systems. The Slingshot host software, including hardware drivers and network middleware libraries, is designed to meet HPC deployments, which predominantly use singletenant access modes. Hence, the Slingshot stack is not suited for secure use in multi-tenant deployments, such as converged HPCCloud deployments. In this paper, we design and implement an extension to the Slingshot stack targeting converged deployments on the basis of Kubernetes. Our integration provides secure, container-granular, and multi-tenant access to Slingshot RDMA networking capabilities at minimal overhead.