What is a SmartNIC?
The term “smart” is applied to many devices and functions these days. We have smartphones, smart homes, smartwatches and more. So, what then is a SmartNIC?
For those not familiar, “NIC” is an acronym for Network Interface Card which is a relatively dumb device that has Ethernet ports and enables network connectivity from a computer or server. SmartNICs by contrast, have some measure of programmability or flexibility to perform tasks that traditional dumb NICs cannot handle such as packet processing. Examples of packet processing functions are timestamping, flow shunting, deduplication, packet filtering and flow classification. Often these functions are performed by a CPU, but with a SmartNIC that burden is shifted to an FPGA which is much more capable of efficiently handling these tasks while leaving the CPU to perform other higher value functions.
Accolade Technology offers a complete line of SmartNICs from 1G all the way up to 2-ports of 100G. In addition, Accolade offers advanced features on SmartNICs from Xilinx. The Xilinx line of SmartNICs are branded as Alveo.
To discuss how a SmartNIC can help you, please contact us at [email protected].