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 removed from the CPU and handled by the SmartNIC itself.
Accolade Technology offers a complete line of SmartNICs from 1G all the way up to 2-ports of 100G. For a complete review of all ANIC SmartNIC features please see below