Buddy: communication offloading engine on DPU

Citation

• Wahlgren, J., Hu, A., Pearce, R., Gokhale, M. and Peng, I., 2026. Communication Offloading on SmartNIC DPUs: A Quantitative Approach. In European Conference on Parallel Processing 2026 (EuroPar'26).

Main components:

• libbuddy.so: The client library that interacts with the application. Its APIs are defined in src/buddy.h.
• buddy-proxy: The DPU routing agent. It runs on BlueField smartNIC DPU or x86 platforms.

Dependency:

• CMake version 3.9 and above
• MPI
• OpenMP

Build

First time, you may need to initialize git submodules:

git submodule update --init --recursive

On the host, build the host component:

mkdir build-host && cd build-host
cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=[Release|Debug]
make

Then, on the DPU, build the DPU agent:

mkdir build-dpu && cd build-dpu
cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=[Release|Debug]
make

Run

First, on the DPU, start the DPU agent:

./build-dpu/src/buddy-proxy 

Then, on the host, start the program. For example,

/build-host$ BUDDY_DPU=bf01 mpirun -np 16 ./test/histo 10000 1000000 1

Configuration

This section lists environment variables that control Buddy.

Client

• BUDDY_DPU: Network host of the local DPU. The DPU address is configured in the contents of /usr/local/etc/buddy_dpu.
• BUDDY_TRACE: Verbosity value from 1-3 to log API calls.

DPU Agent

• BUDDY_TRACE: Set it 1 to log API calls.
• BUDDY_TIMEOUT: Seconds to wait for blocked requests to progress before failing.
• BUDDY_QUIET_TIME: Seconds to wait for additional messages to arrive before flushing buffers.