The HPCA Keynote will be delivered by Derek Chiou.

Server design has traditionally been processor-centric. Processors received each input and decided whether to process it first or pass it to another component, such as an accelerator or memory, to be processed and/or stored. In public clouds that rent virtual machines to tenants, however, the center of the server is moving from processors to SmartNICs/IPUs/DPUs that implement cloud infrastructure functionality such as triage of IO, virtualization, security, and Quality of Service. SmartNICs are complex systems, requiring programmable components for flexibility, ASICs for performance and efficiency, and software to coordinate and manage. This talk (i) motivates moving the center of cloud servers to SmartNICs, (ii) describes what SmartNICs do and how they do it, (iii) discusses the tradeoffs of implementing programmability on cores and FPGAs, and (iv) explores potential future paths for SmartNICs and the functionality they implement.

Bio: Derek is a Professor in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin.

He received his Ph.D., S.M. and S.B. degrees from the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There he was a member of the Computation Structures Group within the Laboratory of Computer Science(now combined with the former Artificial Intelligence Laboratory to form CSAIL.) His Ph.D. advisors were Professor Arvind and Dr. Larry Rudolph. His research interests at MIT were computer architecture, parallel system architecture, simulation, parallel run-time systems and compilers. He was an architect of the StarT-Voyager machine as well as the StarT-NG machine. His is currently a research affilate of CSAIL.

After completing his Ph.D., Dr. Chiou became a system architect at Avici Systems, a company that designs high-end, scalable core routers. His responsibilities there included overall system architecture, component architecture including our proprietary scalable switch fabric, fabric interface chips and traffic managers and leading all of Avici’s architectural simulation efforts. He was a member of the Board of Directors of Dharmacon, a company that produces siRNA and custom RNA oligos, until the company was acquired by Fisher Scientific in May, 2004. He developed their original database system that managed Dharmacon’s operations from synthesis and quality assurance to quote generation, shipping/invoicing and customer service.