Xilinx revolutionises the modern data centre with Alveo SmartNICs

Author: Beatrice

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,” says Salil Raje, executive vice president and general manager, Data Centre 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 Viti 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 including Virtio.blk, NVMe over TCP, Ceph, and compression and crypto services.

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.

The Alveo SN1022 SmartNIC will be generally available in March 2021.