Any way to get real-time power consumption of bluefield2 SmartNic card?

Infrastructure & Networking BlueField
1

We intend to get the real-time power consumption of bluefield2 SmartNic cards. Looking through bluefield documents, we do find some clues for real-time power, such as getting via BMC, or reading particular PCIe registers. But none of them can actually work. We want to confirm if power monitoring is really NOT supported in the hardware design, or maybe there are some undocumented methods to get it, e.g. via undocumented ipmi raw commands, or via i2c links. Any comments will be appreciated. Thanks!

Below are methods we have tried:

  • It is mentioned in the BlueField BMC document that BMC has the ability of Environmental monitoring – voltage/current/power. But we only see the voltages from BMC sensor information.

  • From the Nvidia Adapters Programmer’s Reference Manual (PRM), we find there is a set of PCIe registers for Voltage and Power (MVCAP, MVCR, MSPS, MCPP). But we failed to get valid register values with the tool mlxreg.

2

Hi @lei.wang9,

Currently, the BMC can get voltage but not power. Conceivable it is possible but not part of any planned feature. On BF-2, we also don’t monitor every voltage rail on the board.
On BF-3, we monitor the power from the Arm but not on BF-2.
Those registers in the PRM are dependent on hardware on the board to support such which is not available on BF-2.

Thanks,
Chen

3

Thank you for the confirmation!

4

This topic was automatically closed 14 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.