Corundum: Open-source, high performance, FPGA-based NIC

Re:Corundum: Open-source, high performance, FPGA-based NIC by ncmncm on Wednesday January 08, 2020 @08:37AM (#21991267)

$350 is cheap for such a powerful NIC. You could pay $10k for a Napatech, or $2k for a Solarflare, and not get this level of programmability.

libexanic is a remarkably clean user-space kernel-bypass library that allows you to do processing on early fragments of the packet while the rest are still being received.

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Re:Corundum: Open-source, high performance, FPGA-based NIC by archi42 on Wednesday January 08, 2020 @10:38AM (#21992292)

Hence the hobbyist. As a professional engineer I mostly care if the investment into expensive hardware (and developing/adapting a software stack) is worth the gains. And I can totally see that adding a $2k card to a bunch of $5k servers can be cheaper than throwing more servers at a problem (especially after saving on power, rack space and cooling). But in that context I'd only consider a used $350 card for dev/eval work. I don't want to tell the customer that his infrastructure was down for a few days because I convinced him to cheap out on a NIC.

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Re:Corundum: Open-source, high performance, FPGA-based NIC by yjftsjthsd-h on Wednesday January 08, 2020 @02:04PM (#21994618)

> But in that context I'd only consider a used $350 card for dev/eval work. I don't want to tell the customer that his infrastructure was down for a few days because I convinced him to cheap out on a NIC.

I would argue that it strongly depends on the price differential and how resilient your system is. If your system is properly failure tolerant, and you can buy twice as much hardware for the same price by accepting a 20% failure rate (say), then it would be strongly advantageous to buy all used hardware.

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Re:Corundum: Open-source, high performance, FPGA-based NIC by imtringued on Wednesday January 08, 2020 @09:56AM (#21991948)

Comparing used prices to new prices is dishonest. It costs $2,961.00 new.

[0] https://www.shi.com/Products/ProductDetail.aspx?SHISystemID=...

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Re:Corundum: Open-source, high performance, FPGA-based NIC by alexforencich on Wednesday January 08, 2020 @05:40PM (#21996553)

I don't know where the heck that price came from. The cards are more like $1200 new.

https://www.cdw.com/product/exablaze-exanic-x10-network-adap...

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Re:Corundum: Open-source, high performance, FPGA-based NIC by harry8 on Friday January 10, 2020 @01:05AM (#22008692)

https://m.aliexpress.com/item/4000523308171.html

Ultrascale. Significantly cheaper. Could it be made to work out is it subject to your comments concerning kintex, pcie straddling?

Aside from that did you know you were going to do this when you did verilog-ethernet etc?

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Re:Corundum: Open-source, high performance, FPGA-based NIC by ncmncm on Wednesday January 08, 2020 @04:45PM (#21996129)

I think we get them for much less.

But Netronomes are remarkably cheap, and you can "offload" eBPC to run on the card's custom cores.

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Re:Corundum: Open-source, high performance, FPGA-based NIC by alexforencich on Wednesday January 08, 2020 @05:41PM (#21996564)

Netronome cards are a gigantic PITA to program, and they are not capable of the precise timing that we need.

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