Broadcom supplies SmartNIC to Baidu

Broadcom has supplied its Stingray 100G SmartNIC to Baidu Cloud.

The Baidu Cloud team worked closely with Broadcom to deliver advanced cloud native applications, network function virtualization, and distributed security, leveraging the Stingray SmartNIC’s programmability and extensive offload features for networking, storage and security.

Broadcom's Stingray adapter offers eight ARM A72 CPU cores running at 3GHz, 300G of memory bandwidth and a 100G NetXtreme Ethernet NIC. Security features includes silicon root of trust and a 100G hardware encryption engine.

“Baidu is partnering with Broadcom for its SmartNIC product offering,” said Liu Ning, director of the Systems Department at Baidu. “Broadcom’s Stingray allows us to offload network and storage workloads from expensive x86 CPU cores, while at the same time delivering strict secure separation between infrastructure workloads and customers’ workloads. The powerful and flexible Stingray System-on-Chip allows us to easily deliver new features to our customers with unmatched feature velocity and cost savings.”

“Running software defined services for storage and networking places an enormous strain on server CPUs, prompting data center operators to rethink their server architectures,” said Dan Harding, vice president of marketing for the Compute and Connectivity Division at Broadcom. “These services require complex I/O processing, consuming up to 35 percent of server CPU and memory resources, degrading application performance and reliability. With Stingray, Baidu is able to move its I/O processing entirely off the CPU and onto the SmartNIC adapter, ensuring that its customer applications run unaffected by these essential but taxing workloads, making their data center more scalable, secure and cost-effective.”

https://www.broadcom.com/products/ethernet-connectivity/smartnic