Xilinx introduces the software-defined, hardware-accelerated Alveo SmartNIC family of data center products

In order to meet the needs of modern data center development, Xilinx announced the launch of a series of new data center products and solutions, including the new Alveo SmartNIC series, smart world AI video analysis application, an accelerated algorithmic transaction reference design capable of sub-microsecond transactions. And the Xilinx App Store.

From networking and AI analytics to financial transactions, today's most demanding and complex applications demand low latency and real-time performance. The achievement of this level of performance has always been limited by the high cost and long cycle of hardware development. With these new products and solutions, Xilinx is clearing the way for software developers to quickly build and deploy software-defined, hardware-accelerated applications on Alveo accelerator cards.

Salil Raje, executive vice president and general manager of Xilinx's Data center division, said: "Data centers are being transformed to increase network bandwidth and optimize for workloads such as artificial intelligence and real-time analytics. These complex, compute-intensive and continually evolving workloads are pushing existing infrastructure to the limits of performance and driving the need for fully composeable software-defined hardware accelerators. "The flexibility provided by this accelerator can optimize today's most demanding applications, while providing the flexibility to quickly adapt to new workloads and protocols and accelerate them at line speeds."

New Alveo SN1000 SmartNIC

The Xilinx Alveo SN1000 is the industry's first composable SmartNIC family, providing software-defined hardware acceleration for a wide range of function offloads. The SN1000 SmartNIC can directly offload CPU-intensive tasks to optimize networking performance, and its open architecture speeds up a wide range of networking functions at line speeds.

Using the Vitis™ Networking platform and industry-standard high-level programming languages such as P4, C, and C++, software developers can build networking features, protocols, and applications that run on SmartNIC's hardware. Vitis Networking enables organizations to quickly and easily combine new network capabilities and adapt existing network capabilities to handle new protocols and applications without changing hardware, enabling future-proof investments.

The SN1000 SmartNIC provides software-defined hardware acceleration for many types of networking, security, and storage offloading, such as Open vSwitch and Virtualization acceleration (Virtio.net). Security offloading includes IPsec, kTLS, and SSL/TLS, while accelerated storage applications include Virtio.blk, NVMe™ over TCP, Ceph, and compression and encryption services.

Industry support

"Vmvare is defining hybrid cloud architectures for the next generation of applications that require higher security. SmartNIC will play a key role in the VMware Cloud Foundation architecture, providing customers with a unified management, security, and resiliency model across bare metal and virtualized environments where, The composability of Xilinx Alveo SN1000 SmartNIC will provide customers with a flexible, integrated, premium solution." Lee Caswell, vice President of marketing, VMware Cloud Platform Group

"Today's software-defined data centers need the flexibility and scalability to meet the changing demands of customer workloads. "The innovative, composable offload framework of the Alveo SN1000 SmartNIC family enables Inspur to rapidly develop and deploy custom workloads with the flexibility to adapt to evolving customer needs." -- Li Pengchong, general manager of Inspur Group's Network Division

The SN1000 SmartNIC series is based on the Xylinx 16nmUltraScale+ architecture, featuring a low-latency Xylinx XCU26 FPGA and a 16-core Arm® processor. The SN1000 SmartNIC offers dual QSFP ports for 10/25/100Gb/s connectivity with leading small package performance and PCIe Gen4 connectivity. The SN1000 comes in a full-height half-length form factor and a 75-watt power package.

Build an intelligent world with a new AI video analytics platform

Xilinx is launching an AI video analytics platform with an ecosystem of partner solutions to accelerate the most complex and delay-sensitive AI video inference applications. The Xilinx smartworld platform, powered by a video machine learning stream server, provides overall application acceleration and supports multiple neural networks with deterministic pipeline delays of less than 100 ms on a single Alveo accelerator card. The result is support for demanding AI video analytics applications at the industry's lowest total cost of ownership (TCO).

Xilinx smart world ecosystem solutions are now available, including:

Aupera combines the company's intelligent video processing with Alveo accelerators to deliver turnkey smart cities and smart retail solutions.
Mipsology provides a toolset to facilitate the easy migration of existing AI applications from a GPU-based architecture to the Alveo platform with plug-and-play, high-performance AI inference acceleration.

DeepAI provides AI training at the edge through Alveo accelerators, delivering up to 10x performance improvements per unit cost compared to GPU-based solutions.

Low latency electronic trading for all employees

Traditionally, implementing sub-microsecond latency in algorithmic transactions has required costly and time-consuming hardware development. Now, the Vitis development platform offers an accelerated Algorithmic Trading (AAT) reference design. It enables software developers to quickly and cost-effectively achieve sub-microsecond transaction performance without having to develop custom hardware.

AAT is implemented on the Alveo accelerator card. It provides a modular design that includes all the necessary components for an end-to-end low latency trading solution. Each module can be customized on the Vitis platform using C and C+ to meet the specific needs of each business.