How to load the Intel QAT in N2 Google Cloud machine?

[HermesCui]

My team would like to test the compression by the Intel QAT on the N2, but it seems do not support the QAT. Could You tell me how to build the Machine that will support the QAT?

 

[alexmoore]

Hi,

N2 instance types do not support QATlib, you would need the recently announced C3 Metal instance which exposes the hardware, you can read about QAT support in this blog post:

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/compute/compute-and-infrastructure-enhancements-at-next24?e=4...

That being said, some aspects of QAT do work on existing VM types, for example I just successfully tried QAT Engine for OpenSSL on a C3 VM:

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/guide/building-software-acceleration-feat...

I realise this is cryptographic acceleration and not compression, but just to say QAT is a family of capabilities.

Alex

[HermesCui]

I appreciate your response!

For the N2 instance, could it can support other QAT driver beside QATLib?  There is a report about QAT on N2, which is reason why we need to try this 

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/partner/workload/google/nginx-gcp-n2-with-qat-benchmark.html

[alexmoore]

Ah, this is a very good point - and in fact I fell into the same trap when I first tried N2 with QAT Engine for OpenSSL 🙂

So N2 instances actually have different CPU generations available and QAT was only added to Ice Lake and newer platforms.  Which means you need to specify "Intel Ice Lake" as the minimum CPU platform when you provision the N2 instance, as per: 

https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/specify-min-cpu-platform

As per the general intel guidance here: 

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/guide/building-software-acceleration-feat...

You can tell if you have the right platform because all features required will be present:

$ cpuid -1 | egrep 'VAES|VPCLM|GFNI|AVX512F|AVX512IFMA'
      AVX512F: AVX-512 foundation instructions = true
      AVX512IFMA: fused multiply add           = true
      VAES instructions                        = true
      VPCLMULQDQ instruction                   = true

[HermesCui]

Yeah, I already given up the N2, but I try the C3 standard VM. I can not find the device to support the QAT.  Since, I would like to try the hardware accelerator.

[alexmoore]

So as per my original reply, QAT is a family of technologies.  The link you shared regarding the nginx benchmark on N2 is using QAT Engine for OpenSSL and this will work on N2 but requires Ice Lake platform, it is still accelerating ssl cryptographic functions on hardware.

QATlib however requires exposure of specific intel hardware capabilities that are not currently surfaced on Google Cloud VMs, but they will be surfaced on the upcoming C3 metal instances as per the blog post I shared earlier - as with those instances you are running on the bare metal.