Netronome has developed a domain-specific architecture (DSA) that allows customers to build accelerators for networking and storage applications in data center and edge computing markets. This delivers efficient and high-performance heterogeneous solutions when paired with multi-core processors. Netronome’s technology can be purchased as hardened IP blocks to build custom SoC silicon devices, as SoC devices, SmartNICs or Smart Edge platforms and related software.
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We have seen the value of disaggregation in many areas. Most recently, in the world of networking driven by the OCP community. It has enabled significant choice in how operators procure networking equipment and eliminated vertical, inflexible solutions and vendor lock-in. Is it now time for disaggregation at the silicon level?
There is a significant shift in the world of server networking implemented using network interface cards (NICs). Moore’s Law is stalling or dying, and general-purpose CPUs cannot keep up with tasks related to software-defined networking, security and storage – I will refer to this as SDX. So far the NIC and the x86 CPU have been the vehicles for implementing SDX, but now that solution is grossly inadequate – it kills server productivity by taking away CPU cores from revenue-generating applications and stymies application performance. A SmartNIC is needed to address the challenge posed by SDX. Can the traditional NIC chip be combined with another, cheaper general-purpose CPU such as an Arm core to create a SmartNIC?
Who among us can’t forget Steve Ballmer’s animated performance at the Microsoft developers conference those years ago? As intense as he was, he was also right. Developers were key to Microsoft’s success. Fast forward to 2018 and a slightly different look at a Microsoft initiative. Well, Open19 is more about LinkedIn, but the ownership goes up to Microsoft.
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Quentin Monnet is a senior software engineer at Netronome, where he works on advanced technologies at the driver level, such as the software pieces of eBPF offload, and modestly contributes to several open source projects. Before joining Netronome, he was part of the Research & Development team at 6WIND, and was involved in European research projects that focused on fast, flexible and stateful packet processing for SDNs. Quentin holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Université Paris-Est, France.