Yes! Was surprised the paper didn't specifically mention RDMA, or to a lesser degreee SRIOV, with all their focus on NICs. Also, there may be ongoing research,

Yes! Was surprised the paper didn't specifically mention RDMA, or to a lesser degreee SRIOV, with all their focus on NICs. Also, there may be ongoing research, but it isn't theory at all. HPCs, HFTs, and the could providers have been leveraging RDMA for a long time - e.g. Infiniband. Doing it over Ethernet (RRoCE) is relatively new, and it isn't necessarily any big leap that is happens over 100G instead of 40 or 1. However, an interesting point as network links go to 100G+ (esp. for RDMA) is again on the storage/processing side. E.g. a wireshark capture on a 100G connection? ~12.5 GB/second, near max bandwidth for DDR3, and can fill 64GB of RAM in about 5 seconds at full fire-hose. So again the hot-potato of bottleneck will be passed, at least for maximum sustained performance situations. Side note, AFAIK RoCE exists mostly due to non-technical arguments, particularly the inertia created by existing familiarity and deployment of Ethernet in data centers. I think Microsoft was the one flexing on a standards-body to push it through. It is somewhat of a kludge as Ethernet wasn't designed with RDMA in mind - no guaranteed predictable latency, frames can and will disappear if switch buffers overflow, etc. So IMO "research" into the topic isn't super profound - akin to studying how your sedan might be heavily modified to go off-roading almost (but not quite) as well as a pick-up truck. Even now many that have the luxury are just going Infiniband from the get-go if RDMA/latency are the key priorities rather than tacked on later.