Paper Title: A SmartNIC Developed for Scientific Applications

Paper Abstract: ESnet, the Energy Sciences Network, is a high-speed computer network serving US Department of Energy (DoE) scientists and their collaborators. The network has recently developed its own SmartNIC for connecting individual projects or groups of projects. The requirements were extremely high speed (packet capture at 100 Gbps and monitoring at 1 Tbps), low cost (a few thousand dollars per device), simple attachment (either directly into shared spectrum or into a router), and ease of programming (in C or assembly language rather than requiring a hardware designer). The device must serve the needs of a wide range of research projects ranging from network telemetry to real time load balancing, DWDM link optimization, and host based offload for streaming data. Initial devices have been implemented, and have shown highly promising cost-performance tradeoffs.

Paper Author: Yatish Kumar, Affiliate, ESnet

Author Bio: Yatish Kumar is presently an affiliate with ESnet, the networking provider for the US Department of Energy. He focuses on improving network performance and taking full advantage of the latest technology developments such as SmartNICs. He was previously founder/CTO at Corsa Networks, where he designed switches for software-defined networking (SDN). He served on the chip advisory board for the Open Networking Foundation (ONF), and was the area director for standards at ONF. He also worked at Catena Networks, where he led the design team responsible for developing the industry’s lowest power ADSL and POTS codecs which allowed Catena to become the leader in ADSL retrofits in all major RBOC accounts. He holds patents in DSP architectures and data compression and has authored papers on high level synthesis and embedded processor design. He has contributed to the development of the ITU 992.1, ANSI T1.413, and Telcordia GR909 standards. He earned a bachelor’s degree in engineering from Carleton University (Canada).