Server design has traditionally been processor-centric. Processors received each input and decided whether to process it first or pass it to another component, such as an accelerator or memory, to be processed and/or stored. In public clouds that rent virtual machines to tenants, however, the center of the server is moving from processors to SmartNICs/IPUs/DPUs that implement cloud infrastructure functionality such as triage of IO, virtualization, security, and Quality of Service. SmartNICs are complex systems, requiring programmable components for flexibility, ASICs for performance and efficiency, and software to coordinate and manage. This talk (i) motivates moving the center of cloud servers to SmartNICs, (ii) describes what SmartNICs do and how they do it, (iii) discusses the tradeoffs of implementing programmability on cores and FPGAs, and (iv) explores potential future paths for SmartNICs and the functionality they implement.

Bio: Derek Chiou is a Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at The University of Texas at Austin and a Partner Architect at Microsoft responsible for future infrastructure offload system architecture. He is a co-founder of the Azure Boost project, Microsoft’s SmartNIC effort, and lead the Bing FPGA team to first deployment of Bing ranking on FPGAs. He was an assistant and associate professor from 2005 to 2016. Before joining UT in 2005, Dr. Chiou was a system architect at Avici Systems, a manufacturer of terabit core routers. Dr. Chiou received his Ph.D., S.M. and S.B. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT.