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Today ’ s most demanding and complex applications – from networking and AI analytics to financial trading – require low-latency and real-time performance . Achieving this level of performance has been limited to expensive and lengthy hardware development . With this new offering , Xilinx is eliminating the barriers for software developers to quickly create and deploy software-defined , hardware accelerated applications on Alveo accelerator cards .

“ Data centres are transforming to increase networking bandwidth and optimise for workloads like Artificial Intelligence and real-time analytics ,” said Salil Raje , EVP 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 optimise today ’ s most demanding applications , as well as the flexibility to quickly take on new workloads and protocols and accelerate them at line rate .”

Alveo SN1000 SmartNICs

The Xilinx Alveo SN1000 is the industry ’ s first family of composable SmartNICs offering software-defined hardware acceleration for all function offloads . SN1000 SmartNICs directly offload CPUintensive tasks to optimise networking performance , with an open architecture that can accelerate a broad range of network functions at line rate .

Using the Vitis Networking platform and industry standard , high-level programming languages such as P4 , C , and C ++, software developers can create network functions , protocols and applications that operate in hardware on the SmartNIC . Vitis Networking allows organisations to quickly and easily compose new and tweak existing network functions to handle new protocols and applications without replacing hardware , futureproofing investments .

SN1000 SmartNICs provide softwaredefined hardware acceleration for a wide-range of networking , security and storage offloads , such as Open vSwitch and virtualisation acceleration ( Virtio . net ). Security offloads include IPsec , kTLS and SSL / TLS and accelerated storage applications .

“ VMware is defining the hybrid cloud architecture for next-generation applications with heightened security requirements ,” said Lee Caswell , VP of Marketing , VMware . “ VMware Cloud Platform Business Unit SmartNICs will play a critical role in the VMware Cloud Foundation architecture by giving customers a unified management , security and resiliency model that spans both bare metal and virtualised environments where the composability of Xilinx Alveo SN1000 SmartNICs will provide a flexible , integrated and qualified solution for customers .”

“ Today ’ s software-defined data centre demands flexibility and scalability to meet the ever-changing needs of customer workloads ,” said Ben Li , General Manager of Network Business Unit at Inspur . “ The innovative composable offload framework of the Xilinx Alveo SN1000 SmartNIC family gives Inspur the agility to adapt to evolving customer needs by rapidly developing and deploying custom workloads .” ◊ www . intelligentdatacentres . com

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