Offloading, Disaggregation, SmartNICs and Sky Computing: Are we on the verge of another explosion in High Performance Networking hardware?

With many advances in the networking space being driven by HPC and Cloud computing investments including recent AI hardware, we are starting to see an emergence of a competitive environment for high performance networks. These networks are also providing a variety of different capabilities aimed at specific markets. Offloading of HPC message processing and message triggering for the AI/HPC market, SmartNICs for security and compression jobs, Disaggregation for flexibility in heterogenous computing and even Sky computing for cloud-interoperability have led to new network products

Focusing on the emerging technologies that are starting to come to market and how they can be useful to HPC. While not all technologies are aimed at HPC we can nonetheless leverage some of them for future HPC systems to give us flexibility and leverage economies of scale with Cloud providers. SmartNICs can be used to provide us system level optimizations while avoiding interference with applications. Disaggregation provides us the opportunity to build systems with highly diverse accelerator types at reasonable cost and efficiency. The performance penalties associated with disaggregation are much better than expected and this talk will present the latest data and analysis on why we’re seeing expectation exceeding performance and what that means for future systems