Enabling Applications to Exploit SmartNICs and FPGAs

In this video from the 2019 OpenFabrics Workshop in Austin, Sean Hefty and Venkata Krishnan from Intel present: Enabling Applications to Exploit SmartNICs and FPGAs.

"Advances in Smart NIC/FPGA with integrated network interface allow acceleration of application-specific computation to
be performed alongside communication. This communication works in a synergistic manner with various acceleration
models that include inline, lookaside or remotely triggered ones. Bringing this technology to the HPC ecosystem for
deployment on next-generation Exascale class systems however requires exposing these capabilities to applications in
terms that are familiar to software developers. In this regard, the lack of a standardized software interface that
applications can use is an impediment to the deployment of Smart NIC/FPGA in Exascale platforms. We propose
extensions to OFI to expose these capabilities. This would improve the performance of middleware based on this
interface. And in turn, this will indirectly benefit applications that use that middleware without requiring any application
changes. Participants will learn about the potential for Smart NIC/FPGA application acceleration and will have the
opportunity to contribute application expertise and domain knowledge to a discussion of how Smart NIC/FPGA
acceleration technology can bring individual applications into the Exascale era."

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It looks that even such hardware and software developments are going in the direction Object Oriented philosophy where the data and behavior are tied together and such abstractions are available to operating system via well defined interfaces.