A Smart Network Interface Approach for Distributed Applications on Xilinx Zynq SoCs

Networked embedded systems have seen tremendous growth with many more complex critical and non-critical systems exchanging information over networks of various types. At each node, information is processed by the network stack before the application sees the data. Large portions of the stack are in software, resulting in significant and non-deterministic delays. While hybrid compute platforms like the Xilinx Zynq can accelerate processing tasks through offloading to programmable logic, the delays incurred due to connectivity can significantly impact overall application latency. In this paper, we present a smart network interface approach for the Xilinx Zynq platform based on datapath extensions within the otherwise standard Ethernet interface. We show that this approach improves computation offload latency by 24–27% and throughput by 37% for a complex computational kernel.