Mellanox NICs (and basically all commercial NICs) do not do what we want. Software is not precise enough, and is on the wrong side of the NIC hardware queues. The whole point of Corundum is to get control of the hardware transmit scheduler on the NIC itself.

It looks like the UCSD team are exploring data center TDMA which no commercial NIC supports. http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~snoeren/papers/tdma-eurosys12.pdf

The group web page is here: https://circuit-switching.sysnet.ucsd.edu/

Corundum was originally geared more towards optical circuit switching applications, but it's certainly not limited to that. Since it's open source, the transmit scheduler can be swapped out for all sorts of NIC and protocol related research.

As others mentioned, datacenter SDN. A FPGA-based hybrid NIC used in production at Azure (>1M hosts): https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2018/0...

Direct link: https://people.freebsd.org/~gallatin/talks/euro2019.pdf

> The reasons outlined above don't seem compelling when a commodity nic like mellanox do so much more already.

This is could be useful for people doing testing and benchmarking on network appliances.

Yeah, I suppose that's a valid use case. Things like ixia need to be fpga-based to measure absolute latency without any uncertainty. You cannot currently get that with enough flexibility in commodity cards.