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I believe they are doing 100Gbps now: https://t.co/cbb7NA9vJf?amp=1 https://t.co/cbb7NA9vJf?amp=1 It's hard for me to see the use case of an FPGA nic. The reas

I believe they are doing 100Gbps now: https://t.co/cbb7NA9vJf?amp=1 https://t.co/cbb7NA9vJf?amp=1 It's hard for me to see the use case of an FPGA nic. The reasons outlined above don't seem compelling when a commodity nic like mellanox do so much more already.

aepiepaey 7y ago
Direct link: https://people.freebsd.org/~gallatin/talks/euro2019.pdf https://people.freebsd.org/~gallatin/talks/euro2019.pdf
jjrh 7y ago
> The reasons outlined above don't seem compelling when a commodity nic like mellanox do so much more already. This is could be useful for people doing testing and benchmarking on network appliances.
- shaklee3 7y ago
  Yeah, I suppose that's a valid use case. Things like ixia need to be fpga-based to measure absolute latency without any uncertainty. You cannot currently get that with enough flexibility in commodity cards.
wmf 7y ago
It looks like the UCSD team are exploring data center TDMA which no commercial NIC supports. http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~snoeren/papers/tdma-eurosys12.pdf http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~snoeren/papers/tdma-eurosys12.pdf
- alexforencich 7y ago
  The group web page is here: https://circuit-switching.sysnet.ucsd.edu/ https://circuit-switching.sysnet.ucsd.edu/ Corundum was originally geared more towards optical circuit switching applications, but it's certainly not limited to that. Since it's open source, the transmit scheduler can be swapped out for all sorts of NIC and protocol related research.
alexforencich 7y ago
Mellanox NICs (and basically all commercial NICs) do not do what we want. Software is not precise enough, and is on the wrong side of the NIC hardware queues. The whole point of Corundum is to get control of the hardware transmit scheduler on the NIC itself.
tmotwu 7y ago
As others mentioned, datacenter SDN. A FPGA-based hybrid NIC used in production at Azure (>1M hosts): https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2018/03/Azure_SmartNIC_NSDI_2018.pdf https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2018/0...

aepiepaey 7y ago

Direct link: https://people.freebsd.org/~gallatin/talks/euro2019.pdf https://people.freebsd.org/~gallatin/talks/euro2019.pdf

jjrh 7y ago

> The reasons outlined above don't seem compelling when a commodity nic like mellanox do so much more already. This is could be useful for people doing testing and benchmarking on network appliances.

shaklee3 7y ago
Yeah, I suppose that's a valid use case. Things like ixia need to be fpga-based to measure absolute latency without any uncertainty. You cannot currently get that with enough flexibility in commodity cards.

wmf 7y ago

It looks like the UCSD team are exploring data center TDMA which no commercial NIC supports. http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~snoeren/papers/tdma-eurosys12.pdf http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~snoeren/papers/tdma-eurosys12.pdf

alexforencich 7y ago
The group web page is here: https://circuit-switching.sysnet.ucsd.edu/ https://circuit-switching.sysnet.ucsd.edu/ Corundum was originally geared more towards optical circuit switching applications, but it's certainly not limited to that. Since it's open source, the transmit scheduler can be swapped out for all sorts of NIC and protocol related research.

alexforencich 7y ago

Mellanox NICs (and basically all commercial NICs) do not do what we want. Software is not precise enough, and is on the wrong side of the NIC hardware queues. The whole point of Corundum is to get control of the hardware transmit scheduler on the NIC itself.

tmotwu 7y ago

As others mentioned, datacenter SDN. A FPGA-based hybrid NIC used in production at Azure (>1M hosts): https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2018/03/Azure_SmartNIC_NSDI_2018.pdf https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2018/0...