Falcon is a HW offloaded reliable transport designed by Google and published under the umbrella of Open Compute Project. It has been designed to to satisfy demanding workloads that require high burst bandwidth, high message rates, and low latency. Workloads such as storage have needed some of these attributes for a long time, however, with newer use cases such as massive-scale AI/ML training and high performance computing (HPC), the need has grown significantly. Falcon incorporates our learnings in traffic shaping, congestion control, load balancing, and more. As a hardware-assisted transport layer, Falcon is designed to be reliable, high performance, and low latency and leverages production-proven technologies including Carousel, Snap, Swift, PLB, and CSIG. Falcon authenticates and encrypts all ULP data on a per-connection basis using the Paddywhack Security Protocol (PSP ) or the IPSEC ESP protocol. Falcon is available on the Intel IPU E2000 series of products.

This talk will focus on Falcon software enablement for the Intel IPU E2000 on Linux. It will include details of connection setup, key exchange and integration with the rdma-core/ibverbs framework. We will also discuss proposed extensions to support advanced features such as unordered connections.