Addressing the demands of the modern data centre, Xilinx has announced a range of new data centre products and solutions, including a new family of Alveo SmartNICs, smart world AI video analytics applications, an accelerated algorithmic trading reference design for sub-microsecond trading, and the Xilinx App Store.
Today’s most demanding and complex applications, from networking and AI analytics to financial trading, require low-latency and real-time performance. Achieving this level of performance has been limited to expensive and lengthy hardware development. With these new products and solutions, Xilinx is eliminating the barriers for software developers to quickly create and deploy software-defined, hardware accelerated applications on Alveo accelerator cards.
“Data centres are transforming to increase networking bandwidth and optimise for workloads like Artificial Intelligence and real-time analytics,” said Salil Raje, Executive Vice President and General Manager, Data Center Group at Xilinx. “These complex, compute-intensive and constantly-evolving workloads are pushing existing infrastructure to its limits and driving the need for fully composable, software-defined hardware accelerators that provide the adaptability to optimise today’s most demanding applications, as well as the flexibility to quickly take on new workloads and protocols and accelerate them at line rate.”
New Alveo SN1000 SmartNICs
The Xilinx Alveo SN1000 is the industry’s first family of composable SmartNICs offering software-defined hardware acceleration for all function offloads. SN1000 SmartNICs directly offload CPU intensive tasks to optimise networking performance, with an open architecture that can accelerate a broad range of network functions at line rate.
Using the Vitis Networking platform and industry standard, high-level programming languages such as P4, C, and C++, software developers can create network functions, protocols and applications that operate in hardware on the SmartNIC. Vitis Networking allows organisations to quickly and easily compose new and tweak existing network functions to handle new protocols and applications without replacing hardware, future-proofing investments.
SN1000 SmartNICs provide software-defined hardware acceleration for a wide-range of networking, security and storage offloads, such as Open vSwitch and virtualisation acceleration (Virtio.net). Security offloads include IPsec, kTLS and SSL/TLS and accelerated storage applications.
“VMware is defining the hybrid cloud architecture for next-generation applications with heightened security requirements,” said Lee Caswell, VP of Marketing. “VMware Cloud Platform Business Unit SmartNICs will play a critical role in the VMware Cloud Foundation architecture by giving customers a unified management, security and resiliency model that spans both bare metal and virtualised environments where the composability of Xilinx Alveo SN1000 SmartNICs will provide a flexible, integrated and qualified solution for customers.”
“Today’s software-defined data centre demands flexibility and scalability to meet the ever-changing needs of customer workloads,” said Ben Li, General Manager of Network Business Unit at Inspur. “The innovative composable offload framework of the Xilinx Alveo SN1000 SmartNIC family gives Inspur the agility to adapt to evolving customer needs by rapidly developing and deploying custom workloads.”
Based on the Xilinx 16nm UltraScale+ architecture, the SN1000 family of SmartNICs are powered by the low-latency Xilinx XCU26 FPGA and a 16-core Arm processor. SN1000 SmartNICs deliver dual-QSFP ports for 10/25/100Gb/s connectivity with leading small packet performance and a PCIe Gen 4 interconnect. The first model in the family is the SN1022, which is offered in a full height, half length form factor in a 75-Watt power envelope.
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