Lumina is a testing tool for hardware network stacks like RDMA. It leverages network programmability to emulate various network scenarios at line rate. Lumina has four components:

1. Orchestrator To run a test, the orchestrator takes a configuration as input, sets up the environment and coordinates the execution of different components.
2. Traffic generator Lumina employs two hosts with the same bandwidth capacity to generate traffic. Both hosts are equipped with the hardware network stack under test and are running separate instances of a traffic generator. One host serves as the requester, while the other functions as the responder. These hosts collaboratively generate network traffic based on the configurations provided by the orchestrator
3. Event injector The event injector serves the purpose of forwarding traffic while also injecting pre-configured events like ECN marks, packet losses, and corruptions.
4. Traffic dumper The event injector mirrors all RDMA packets to the traffic dumpers allowing for offline analysis at a later stage.

• Hardware requirement

  • A top-of-rack Tofino switch.
  • Two servers installed with under-test RDMA NIC (currently we support NVIDIA/Mellanox Connect-X 4-Lx, NVIDIA/Mellanox Connect-X 5, NVIDIA/Mellanox Connect-X 6-Dx and Intel E810).
  • Two servers that support DPDK and possess a total throughput larger or equal to that of the RDMA NIC servers mentioned above.

• Software requirement

  The current version of Lumina has been tested on:

  • Switch: BF SDE 9.4.0.
  • Under test servers:
    • NVIDIA/Mellanox NIC: MLNX_OFED_LINUX-5.8-1.1.2.1-LTS
    • Intel E810: ice 1.9.11 and irdma 1.9.30
  • Mirror servers: DPDK 20.11. PFC is disabled on both the switch and NICs.

We suggest to create a virtual environment before installing Lumina: Creation of virtual environments

• Update setuptools to the latest version: pip3 install --upgrade setuptools
• Install Lumina: python3 setup.py install

Testcases are written as yaml files. The yaml file should include the log-in credential for each component and parameter settings for the specific testcase. We recommend using SSH key-based authentication for passwordless login. Please check this example.

After installation, four files will be generated in ./bin folder: lumina-analyzer, lumina-orch, lumina-test-cnp, lumina-test-gbn.

• Test with a configuration file: python3 bin/lumina-orch -f [configuration (yaml) file name]
• Test with all the configuration files in a folder: python3 bin/lumina-orch -d [folder name]

You can replace bin/lumina-orch with bin/lumina-test-cnp or bin/lumina-test-gbn. lumina-test-cnp and lumina-test-gbn will do some necessary checking and analyzing for CNP testing and retransmission testing respectively, after experiment finishes.

@inproceedings {lumina-yu,
    author = {Yu, Zhuolong and Su, Bowen and Bai, Wei and Raindel, Shachar and Braverman, Vladimir and Jin, Xin},
    title = {Understanding the Micro-Behaviors of Hardware Offloaded Network Stacks with Lumina},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2023 Conference},
    year = {2023}
}