SmartNIC accelerator card improves server capacity says iWave
As data centres becoming saturated with data, the need to offload tasks from the host server’s CPU becomes crucial, said iWave. Smart network interface cards (NICs) help in improving connectivity and communication between a computer and a network while enhancing the networking and processing power of the computer, explained the company.
Its SmartNIC storage accelerator card provides high-speed networking extension with dual front panel QSFP DD cages- two 200GbE / four 100Gbe Ethernet and triple NVMe slots for storage extension.
It has onboard 8Gbyte 72bit DDR4 RAM with an error correction code (ECC) for the processing system and 16Gbyte 128bit RAM for programmable logic.
The SmartNIC card is powered by ZU19 / ZU17 / ZU11 Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC system on module (SoM), offering up to 1143K programmable logic cells.
The quad-core Arm Cortex A53 has a CPU running at 1.5GHz, a dual Cortex R5 real time processor running at 600MHz and an Arm Mali 400MP2 graphic processing unit (GPU), presenting a highly adaptive platform with high performance.
The 3/4 length PCIe Gen3 x16 host interface on the board connects the SmartNIC to the computer or server.
SmartNICs combine Arm and FPGA computing resources to deliver more energy-efficient performance, explained iWave. Reprogrammable FPGAs offer communication service providers unparalleled scalability, allowing them to manage large volumes of subscribers and devices without adding latency or power.
FPGA SmartNICs also balance high performance and power efficiency for networking applications and are also effective in reducing latency and can achieve latency of around one millisecond, advised iWave. Additionally, the FPGA can handle security functions such as encryption, ACL and firewalls, to protect the CPU from malicious attacks.
iWave’s SoM portfolio is built on Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoCs offering scalability to the end applications in terms of logic density, transceiver lanes, and FPGA IOs
Using architectural expertise, iWave assists customers with customisation services for hardware, software porting and algorithm development. It also supports customers with heat sinks, heat spreaders, and enclosures to take care of thermal characteristics and requirements.
