Tuesday, February 23, 2021

Xilinx debuts new family of Alveo SmartNICs and AI video analytics

Xilinx introduced a new family of Alveo SmartNICs, smart world AI video analytics applications, an accelerated algorithmic trading reference design for sub-microsecond trading, and a Xilinx App Store - all aimed at next gen data centers and workloads.

The Xilinx Alveo SN1000 SmartNICs, which is based on the Xilinx 16nm UltraScale+ architecture, are powered by the low-latency Xilinx XCU26 FPGA and a 16-core Arm processor. The 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 SN1000 SmartNICs deliver software-defined hardware acceleration for all function offloads. SN1000 SmartNICs directly offload CPU intensive tasks to optimize networking performance, with an open architecture that can accelerate a broad range of network functions at line rate. Programmability is provided via the company's Vitis Networking platform and industry standard, high-level programming languages such as P4, C, and C++. 

SN1000 SmartNICs provide software-defined hardware acceleration for a wide range of networking, security, and storage offloads, such as Open vSwitch and virtualization 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.

“Data centers are transforming to increase networking bandwidth and optimize 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 optimize today’s most demanding applications as well as the flexibility to quickly take on new workloads and protocols, and accelerate them at line rate.

In addition, Xilinx is launching an AI video analytics platform with an ecosystem of partner solutions built to accelerate the most complex and latency-sensitive AI video inferencing applications. One example use case is retail video analytics, where accelerated video processing could help identify key trends in consumer behavior.

https://www.xilinx.com/applications/data-center/network-acceleration/alveo-sn1000.html