article - DARPA seeks to create new networking approaches to accelerate distributed application performance by 100x

[Nitin Bhide]

https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2019-09-26

DARPA is inviting applications for  "Reinventing the Network Stack for Compute-Intensive Applications". Objective is to "create new networking approaches to accelerate distributed application performance by 100x"

Quote from the article - 

The true bottleneck for processor throughput is the network interface used to connect a machine to an external network, such as an Ethernet, therefore severely limiting a processor’s data ingest capability,” said Dr. Jonathan Smith, a program manager in DARPA’s Information Innovation Office (I2O). “Today, network throughput on state-of-the-art technology is about 10¹⁴ bits per second (bps) and data is processed in aggregate at about 10¹⁴ bps. Current stacks deliver only about 10¹⁰ to 10¹¹ bps application throughputs.”
Addressing the bottleneck between multiprocessor servers and the network links that interconnect them is increasingly critical for distributed computing. This class of computing requires significant communication between computation nodes. It is also increasingly relied on for advanced applications such as deep neural network training and image classification.
To accelerate distributed applications and close the yawning performance gap, DARPA initiated the Fast Network Interface Cards (FastNICs) program. FastNICs seeks to improve network stack performance by a factor of 100 through the creation of clean-slate networking approaches. Enabling this significant performance gain will require a rework of the entire network stack – from the application layer through the system software layer, down to the hardware.
 

Regards,

Nitin