Network interface card accelerates cloud data centers
The U25 combines a highly optimized SmartNIC platform with a flexible FPGA-based engine that supports full programmability and turnkey accelerated applications. The unit addresses the industry’s most challenging demands and workloads such as SDN, virtual switching, NFV, NVMe-oF, electronic trading, AI inference, video transcoding, and data analytics. In addition, Xilinx announced its first XtremeScale Ethernet adapter card in the Open Compute Project (OCP) Spec 3.0 form factor and a proof of concept for the world’s first FPGA-based OCP Accelerator Module (OAM).
The platform enables ‘bump-in-the-wire’ network, storage, and compute offload and acceleration functions for maximum efficiency by avoiding unnecessary data movements and CPU processing. This dramatically reduces the CPU burden and reclaims resources to run more applications. Embedded ARM processors provide unique and critical control plane processing to support emerging bare metal server use cases. Standard full-featured NIC functionality and drivers, including Onload application acceleration software, can reduce latency up to 80 percent and improve transmission control protocol (TCP)-based server application efficiency by up to 400 percent in cloud-based applications, the company claims. The U25 SmartNIC supports turnkey applications from both Xilinx and independent software vendors. The programming model supports high-level network programming abstractions such as HLS and P4, as well as compute acceleration frameworks such as the Vitis unified software platform to enable Xilinx and third party accelerated applications. The first out-of-the-box accelerated application available on the Alveo U25 SmartNIC is support for Open vSwitch (OVS) offload and acceleration. The plug-and-play solution will offload over 90 percent of OVS processing from the server to improve packet throughput by over 5X. Future turnkey solutions from Xilinx are planned for security functions such as IPSec, SSL/TLS, AES-256/128, and distributed firewall as well as AI inference acceleration.
Xilinx – www.xilinx.com
If you enjoyed this article, you will like the following ones: don't miss them by subscribing to :
