Here is a recap of 2018 SPDK Summit at the beautiful Dolce Hayes Mansion, San Jose on May 15th and 16th. We had a successful event and achieved all of our goals. Thanks to the dedication and support of many contributors and great participation from SPDK community members.

Executive Summary

2018 SPDK Summit started with a keynote from Jennifer Huffstetler, VP, Data Center Group, Intel Corp and Jim Harris, Principal Engineer, Intel Corp. Presenters from Nutanix, Alibaba, Oracle, eBay and Cisco shared how SPDK can help with their storage solutions to accelerate performance. We had over 170 attendees from 51 different companies represented at the Summit. Audience enjoyed the sessions which included technical deep dive as well as talks from SPDK community partners highlighting various ways SPDK was integrated into their storage solutions. Overall it was a successful event and we look forward to your participation in our upcoming events. Thanks for making time to provide actionable feedback on the Summit.

Attendance

• We had over 253 attendees registered for the event with about 80% coming from the Bay Area. On day 1 we had 166 attendees and day 2 there were ~120 attendees out of which ~70 attended SPDK developers lab. SPDK Summit sessions were also live streamed on SPDK YouTube channel. We had ~40 online viewers.
• 51 companies were represented, including VMWare, Dell, HPE, IBM, Cisco, Nutanix, Alibaba, SAP, Oracle, eBay, Facebook, NetApp, Mellanox, Micron, Samsung, WD, Fujitsu, and Intel among many others.
• General attendee profile was technical in nature, largely developers.

Thank you!

• Thanks to following groups at Intel Corp for sponsoring the event Data Center Product Marketing Group and Cloud Platform group for funding the event, Non-Volatile Memory Group for sponsoring SSDs for the raffle, Intel Builders for sponsoring Starbucks gift cards, Software Solutions Group for giving away VTune licenses as part of the raffle.
• Many thanks to all the presenters from Intel Corp, Nutanix, Cisco Systems, Oracle, Alibaba and eBay for all the hard work in preparing, reviewing and presenting at the Summit.
• Thanks to all the volunteers who manned the Demo booths and the registration desk at the event.
• Last but not least, thanks to all the attendees for participation in the summit. Without your participation, this event wouldn’t have been successful. Also thanks for submitting surveys and great feedback. We will make every attempt to incorporate the feedback into our next event.

Agenda

• The two day agenda focused on SPDK key features deep dive, presentations from community partners on how SPDK helped them, their learnings and future work.
• Nate Marushak, Director of Storage Acceleration Software at Intel, was the MC for the two-day event and did a magnificent job of keeping the speakers on time and well-stocked with questions from the audience.
  

Day 1

• SPDK Summit was kick started by an Opening keynote from Jennifer Huffstetler, VP, Data Center Group, Intel Corp, on how the storage industry is changing and why optimizing storage software is becoming more critical. She highlighted the importance of Intel’s investment in Open Source Storage Acceleration Software like SPDK, ISA-L, PMDK, DPDK, etc.
  
• Jim Harris, Principal SPDK Architect, Intel Corp, presented on the state of the project, future plans and goals and why it’s important for SPDK community members to participate and contribute to the Project.
  
• Felipe Franciosi from Nutanix shared why Nutanix adopted SPDK and how it has helped extract maximum performance while reducing latency and improving CPU utilization. He showed performance testing result using Intel® Optane™ SSDs and how he could extract over 5 million IOPS while scaling VMs.
  
• Changpeng Liu, Software engineer from Intel Corp, presented Vhost-NVMe deep dive followed by talk from Oracle on NVMe-oF and how Oracle has integrated SPDK in Oracle RDBMS and future work using SPDK.
  
• Ben Walker, Software Engineer, Intel Corp, presented deep-dive on NVMe-oF SPDK driver followed by much awaited talk from Ed Warnicke from Cisco and Tomasz from SPDK team, Intel Corp, on user-space VPP integration with SPDK.
  
• After the break, Jim Harris, Principal Architect from Intel Corp and John Rudelic, Architect in Non-volatile SSD Group, Intel Corp, presented Open Channel SSD introduction and SPDK project plans to support Open Channel SSD.
  
• Ming Lin and Sheng Qiu from Alibaba gave a talk highlighting good, bad and ugly side of production deployments highlighting why they used SPDK and how it helped improve performance, key learnings and ended the talk with future plans to contribute to SPDK community.
  
• Paul Luse, Principal Engineer from SPDK team, Intel Corp presented PMDK library integration with SPDK. He highlighted how SPDK enabled applications can access Persistent memory using SPDK.
  
• Paul Luse from Intel Corp gave a talk on Virtual BDevs and how it can be customized for various use cases.
  
• We concluded the first day of the SPDK Summit with a Networking Event. Everyone enjoyed snacks and drinks while networking with their SPDK community peers.
• Each session appeared to gain significant interest; audience members asked deeply technical and knowledgeable questions.
• To support the presentations with actual data, we had a slew of Demos hosted at the foyer, outside the ballroom. We had over 50 people visiting the demo booths between talks and during breaks. We had the following demos hosted:
  • SPDK demo using Vhost and user space NVMe-oF driver, to showcase performance accessing NVMe=oF devices
  • SPDK integrated with Rack Scale Design
  • SPDK integrated with Cache Acceleration Software
  • SPDK integrated with OpenStack Cinder
  • SPDK profiling using VTune System Studio

Day 2

• Day 2 opened with a highly-interactive technical deep-dive on the SPDK Logical Volumes feature delivered by Daniel Verkamp, Software Engineer, Intel Corp, followed by talk on BDev QOS features of SPDK by Gang Cao, Lead Engineer, Intel Corp.
  
• Prital Shah and Greg Tucker delivered introductory talk on ISA-L, an open source software that optimizes storage functions like Encryption, Compression, Hashing, Deduplication etc. and how spdk vbdev can be created to do encryption etc using ISA-L via DPDK FW.
  
• John Kariuki, Software Engineer from Intel Corp hosted hands on developers lab at the Summit. We had over 70 participants attend the lab, and it was very well received. Attendees got to leverage the Virtual Bdev session from Day 1 to try out coding their first virtual Bdev using vbdev_passthrough template. Thanks to all the attendees for submitting the survey for the lab. Your feedback is very valuable to us.
  
• After lunch, we dove into a talk on ABI, APIs and packaging delivered by Ben Walker. There was good amount of participation from the audience leading to good discussion.
  
• The event concluded with developers meetup hosted by Paul Luse, Intel Corp. and final raffle ticket drawings.
• Congratulations to all the lucky winners of the Raffle!!!!!!
• Presentations from the event are posted on SPDK.io. Videos of the event are posted on YouTube.

Promotional Engagement

• The event was cross promoted by Intel Field team, Market Star, Intel® Builders, multiple DCG organizations, Twitter and SPDK mailing list.