SmartNICs Summit 2023
I attended the 2023 SmartNICs Summit in San Jose on 14th June.
I was there on behalf of Ethernet Alliance to do a guest presentation on what's happening in Ethernet. My slides are at Ethernet Alliance: Higher Speeds, More Pervasive Usage, New Use Cases.
While I was there, I got to participate as an attendee in sessions from both big (NVIDIA, Intel, AMD, …) and small (BloomBase, Canonical, Algo-Logic) companies. . The presentations are available at the SmartNICs Summit 2023 Proceedings page.
As you'd expect there was lots of excitement about SmartNICs, even if agreement about exactly what they should do and how they should be used is a bit tenuous.
Some of the topics I got involved with included:
Data Sovereignty & Privacy
Emerging AI regulation, e.g., European Union’s AI Act
Cybersecurity for the SmartNICs themselves. Many of them have a set of CPU cores (ARM, RISC-V, etc) and there is a strong desire to let people do their own thing with these resources.
We know about "packet of death" attack on network devices
We have to assume SmartNIC data processing engines will be an attractive target for attack
How do we build in the set of tools up front that we have spent decades adding to Linux
Requirements and characteristics of networks for AI training clusters (THE COST OF TRAINING LLMs)
The informal part of the event gave me a chance to meet a bunch of interesting people (mostly vendors, but some users), and I have follow-ups coming with 5+ companies.
