Welcome to our blog series where we catch up with the winners of the SONiC Hackathon 2022. In this blog series, we’ll dive into their innovative projects, their journey after the SONiC Hackathon, and how their projects are making a difference in the open networking world. Today, we sat down with the team from Nvidia , who presented SONiC Distributed Orchagent, the recipient of the “Most Impactful” award.
Can you briefly introduce yourself and your team? How did you all come together for the 2022 SONiC Hackathon?
I am Sudharsan Dhamal Gopalarathnam. I am Software Engineering Manager, managing Nvidia SONiC team in Redmond. My team consists of Vivek Reddy Karri who is working in SONiC design team in Redmond and Marian Pritsak who is an architect for SONiC in Redmond.
What inspired your project for the 2022 SONiC Hackathon? Could you describe what your project was for those who may not be familiar with it?
Nvidia introduced the framework for creating App extensions in SONiC. However, these app extensions don’t have an ability to extend new logic to orchagent or program new SAI parameters that are not already handled by orchagent. In order to achieve the above functionality, our project introduced the concept of distributed orchagent, where there will be a separate orchagent running in app extension docker that can handle the required logic to program the new SAI attributes.
How did winning the award in your respective category (Most Wanted By Users, Most Impactful, Most Innovative) impact you and your team?
The winning has given a great boost to the team’s enthusiasm. I has encouraged the team to think about enhancements and come up with solutions, some of which were contributed to the community in the past year.
Since the Hackathon, what progress has been made on your project? Could you share any significant milestones or achievements?
This project has been scheduled in the pipeline for the list of features that are planned to be implemented. I am expecting this to be scheduled somewhere in 2024 based on the current priorities of the organization.
What are your current projects? Are they an extension of your hackathon project or something entirely new?
Most of our current projects are not related to hackathon. However once we have hackathon project upstreamed, we expect few app extensions to utilize this infrastructure and provide the ability to program SAI and ASIC.
Could you share your future plans? How do you see your project evolving in the next few years?
As mentioned above, the future plans include to contribute this infrastructure based on prioritization and following that we will use this infrastructure to add some app extensions.
What advice do you have for future participants in the SONiC Hackathon? What do you wish you had known before participating?
Always brainstorm different ideas ahead, irrespective of hackathon dates so that when hackathon is announced you will be having a list of ideas to pick and prioritize.
