Innovation is recognized when it disrupts a market. Network Interface Cards (NICs) have existed since the 1980s, and around the turn of the century, various companies began innovating in this area. Their initial focus was on High-Performance Computing (HPC). While businesses ran on Ethernet, the most powerful HPC clusters in the world were created using Myrinet or Infiniband. The NICs for these networks were architected to bypass the operating system (OS) kernel and communicate directly with HPC applications delivering substantially greater performance. To make this happen, these NICs applied extensive computational resources at the edge of the network, enabling them to offload common communications tasks from the host CPU.
These HPC NICs laid the groundwork for what then became Ethernet NICs with built-in kernel bypass for electronic trading in all the world's stock markets. Over time these platforms further evolved into what has become SmartNICs or Data Processing Units (DPUs). With the emergence of Hyperscalers and Cloud Service Providers (CSPs), Xilinx has idenfied three things that have hampered the adoption of SmartNICs:
- Programmability
- Composability
- Portability
Xilinx's approach of providing a software-defined, hardware-accelerated platform lends itself perfectly to addressing these three issues.
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