DARPA looks for new NICs to speed up networks
The government agency that gave us the Internet 50 years ago is now looking to drastically increase network speed to address bottlenecks and chokepoints for compute-intensive applications.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), an arm of the Pentagon, has unveiled a computing initiative, one of many, that will attempt to overhaul the network stack and interfaces that cannot keep up with high-end processors and are often the choke point for data-driven applications.
The DARPA initiative, Fast Network Interface Cards, or FastNICs, aims to boost network performance by a factor of 100 through a clean-slate transformation of the network stack from the application to the system software layers running on top of steadily faster hardware. DARPA is soliciting proposals from networking vendors. .