Xilinx offers new data-center solutions with algorithmic trading framework

Addressing the demands of the modern data center, Xilinx, Inc. recenetly announced a range of new data center products and solutions, including a new family of Alveo SmartNICs, smart world AI video analytics applications, an accelerated algorithmic trading reference design for sub-microsecond trading, and the Xilinx App Store.

Today’s most demanding and complex applications, from networking and AI analytics to financial trading, require low-latency and real-time performance. Achieving this level of performance has been limited to costly and lengthy hardware development.

With these new products and solutions, Xilinx is eliminating the barriers for software developers to quickly create and deploy software-defined, hardware-accelerated applications on Alveo accelerator cards.

“Data centers are transforming to increase networking bandwidth and optimize for workloads like artificial intelligence and real-time analytics,” said Salil Raje, executive VP and GM, Data Center Group at Xilinx. “These complex, compute-intensive and constantly-evolving workloads are pushing existing infrastructure to its limits and driving the need for fully compostable, software-defined hardware accelerators that provide the adaptability to optimize today’s most demanding applications as well as the flexibility to quickly take on new workloads and protocols, and accelerate them at line rate.”

The Alveo SN1000 SmartNICs
The Xilinx Alveo SN1000 is the industry’s first family of composable SmartNICs offering software-defined hardware acceleration for all function offloads. SN1000 SmartNICs directly offload CPU-intensive tasks to optimize networking performance, with an open architecture that can accelerate a broad range of network functions at line rate.

Using the Vitis Networking platform and industry-standard, high-level programming languages — such as P4, C, and C++ — software developers can create network functions, protocols, and applications that operate in hardware on the SmartNIC. Vitis Networking allows organizations to quickly and easily compose new, and tweak existing, network functions to handle new protocols and applications without replacing hardware, future-proofing investments.

The SN1000 SmartNICs provide software-defined hardware acceleration for a wide range of networking, security, and storage offloads, such as Open vSwitch and virtualization acceleration. Security offloads include IPsec, kTLS, and SSL/TLS and accelerated storage applications including Virtio.blk, NVMe over TCP, Ceph, and compression and crypto services.

“Today’s software-defined data center demands flexibility and scalability to meet the ever-changing needs of customer workloads,” said Ben Li, GM of Network Business Unit at Inspur. “The innovative composable offload framework of the Xilinx Alveo SN1000 SmartNIC family gives Inspur the agility to adapt to evolving customer needs by rapidly developing and deploying custom workloads.”

Based on the Xilinx 16nm UltraScale+ architecture, the SN1000 family of SmartNICs are powered by the low-latency Xilinx XCU26 FPGA and a 16-core Arm® processor. SN1000 SmartNICs deliver dual-QSFP ports for 10/25/100Gb/s connectivity with leading small packet performance and a PCIe Gen 4 interconnect.

The first model in the family is the SN1022, which is offered in a full-height, half-length form factor in a 75-Watt power envelope.