Xilinx SmartNIC Platform Bringing Network, Storage and Compute Acceleration to Cloud Data Centers on Single Device

Xilinx, Inc. announced a SmartNIC platform delivering convergence of network, storage and compute acceleration functions on a single device.

Alveo U25 SmartNIC

The Alveo U25 SmartNIC is designed to bring,efficiency and lower TCO benefits of SmartNICs to cloud service providers, telcos, and private cloud data center operators struggling with increasing networking demands and rising costs. It combines an SmartNIC platform with a flexible FPGA-based engine that supports full programmability and turnkey accelerated applications. It delivers a SmartNIC platform to address the ichallenging demands and workloads such as SDN, virtual switching, NFV, NVMe-oF, electronic trading, AI inference, video transcoding, and data analytics.

In addition, the company announced its its first XtremeScale Ethernet adapter card in the Open Compute Project (OCP) Spec 3.0 form factor and a PoC for a first FPGA-based OCP Accelerator Module (OAM).

“The SmartNIC market is forecast to surpass $600 million and comprise 23% of the worldwide Ethernet adapter market by 2024,” according to Baron Fung, research director, Dell’Oro Group. “As cloud service providers scale capacity upwards, they are increasing their deployment of SmartNICs to free up valuable CPU cores for business applications, optimizing server utilization. The telco service providers, another market with strong growth potential, are looking to integrate SmartNICs from the core to the edge of the network for applications such as NFV and AI inferencing. FPGA-based SmartNICs such as the Alveo U25 are well positioned to address this growing market opportunity.“

Converged SmartNIC platform for accelerated clouds
As network port speeds continue to increase, tier-2 and -3 cloud service providers, telcos, and private cloud data center operators are facing networking challenges and costs. Still, the significant R&D investments required to develop and deploy SmartNICs have hindered broader adoption. The Alveo U25 SmartNIC platform addresses these barriers by providing plug-and-play capabilities that make SmartNICs accessible for more widespread deployments.

Powered by the company’s FPGA technology, the Alveo U25 SmartNIC provides higher throughput and a more adaptable engine than SoC-based NICs to allow cloud architects to accelerate a wide range of functions and applications. The platform enables ‘bump-in-the-wire’ network, storage, and compute offload and acceleration functions for efficiency by avoiding unnecessary data movements and CPU processing. This reduces the CPU burden and reclaims resources to run more applications. Embedded ARM processors provide critical control plane processing to support emerging bare metal server use cases. The baseline NIC delivers high throughput, small packet performance, and low-latency. Standard full-featured NIC functionality and drivers, including Onload application acceleration software, can reduce latency up to 80% and improve transmission control protocol (TCP)-based server application by up to 400% in cloud-based applications.

Alveo U25 SmartNIC

“Today’s cloud infrastructures suffer from critical data bottlenecks caused by server I/O,” said Donna Yasay, VP, marketing, data center group, Xilinx. “With up to 30% of data center compute resources allocated for networking I/O processing, overhead continues to grow along with CPU cores. Xilinx is addressing the challenges resulting from the increased demands on networking by providing an easier to deploy SmartNIC with turnkey accelerated applications and out-of-the-box capabilities that go far beyond fundamental networking.“

Out-of-the-box accelerated applications for faster time-to-market
The Alveo U25 SmartNIC platform enables turnkey accelerated applications that make it for non-tier-1 cloud data center operators to deploy SmartNICs and quickly reap the benefits. It supports applications from both the company and ISVs. 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 the firm 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% of OVS processing from the server to improve packet throughput by over 5X.

Future solutions from the company are planned for security functions such as IPSec, SSL/TLS, AES-256/128, and distributed firewall as well as AI inference acceleration.

The Alveo U25 SmartNIC is currently sampling with early access customers. availability is expected in 3Q20.

Alveo U25 SmartNIC specifications
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OCP 3.0 Ethernet adapter and OCP accelerator M=module

The company also unveiled the XtremeScale X2562 10/25G Ethernet adapter card based on the OCP Spec 3.0 form factor. Designed for performance electronic trading environments and enterprise data centers, the X2562 features sub-microsecond latency and high throughput with ultra-scale connectivity for real-time packet and flow information to thousands of virtual NICs.

The X2562 is currently sampling and will be available in 2Q020.

XtremeScale X2562 specifications
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Additionally, the company announed a PoC for a world’s first FPGA-based Open Compute Accelerator Module (OAM). Based on the firm’s UltraScale+ VU37P FPGA with 8GB of HBM memory and compliant with Open Accelerator Infrastructure (OAI), the mezzanine-based card supports seven 25Gb x8 links to enable rich inter-module system topologies for distributed acceleration.

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August 12, 2019 | Press Release