  There is an increasing demand to incorporate hybrid environments as part of
workflows across edge, cloud, and HPC systems. In a such converging environment
of cloud and HPC, containers are starting to play a more prominent role,
bringing their networking infrastructure along with them. However, the current
body of work shows that container overlay networks, which are often used to
connect containers across physical hosts, are ill-suited for the HPC
environment. They tend to impose significant overhead and noise, resulting in
degraded performance and disturbance to co-processes on the same host. This
paper focuses on utilizing a novel class of hardware, Data Processing Unit, to
offload the networking stack of overlay networks away from the host onto the
DPU. We intend to show that such ancillary offload is possible and that it will
result in decreased overhead on host nodes which in turn will improve the
performance of running processes.
