Alveo SN1000 SmartNIC Accelerator Card

Important Information

While the Alveo SN1022 adaptive SmartNIC is actively being supported for current users, AMD recommends that all new designs target the Alveo U45 network accelerator. Contact an AMD product specialist for any questions.

Overview

Product Description

The AMD Alveo SN1000 is the industry’s first SmartNIC offering software-defined hardware acceleration for all function offloads in a single platform. SN1000 SmartNICs directly offload CPU-intensive tasks to optimize networking performance, with an architecture that can accelerate a broad range of custom offloads at line rate, including support for customer-built and third-party offloads.

Based on the AMD 16nm UltraScale+™ architecture, SN1000 SmartNICs are powered by the low-latency AMD XCU26 FPGA and a 16-core Arm® processor.


Key Features & Benefits

P4 Programmability

The SN1000 features full protocol-level offload acceleration customization, application-specific data paths, and the ease of P4 high-level language programming. Vitis Networking,  P4 toolkit from AMD, enables customers to compose custom offloads and tweak existing offloads to handle new protocols and applications without replacing hardware.

Customized Offloads

SN1000 SmartNICs provide software-defined hardware acceleration for a wide range of networking, security, and storage offloads.

  • Network: Open vSwitch and virtualization acceleration (Virtio.net)
  • Security: IPsec, kTLS and SSL/TLS
  • Storage: Virtio.blk, NVMe™ over TCP, Ceph, and compression and crypto services
Specifications

Card Specifications

For full product specifications refer to the Product Brief.

Board Specifications Alveo SN1000 SmartNIC Accelerator Cards
SN1022
Interfaces
PCI Express PCIe Gen 4 x8 or Gen 3 x16
Network Interfaces 2x100G QSFP28 DA copper or optical transceiver
Link Speeds 100GbE
Arm Processor Discrete 16-core Cortex-A72 Processor
DRAM Memory
DDR Format -1x 4GB x 72 DDR4-2400 (Arm® Processor) -2x 4GB x 72 DDR4-2400 (FPGA)
Performance
Full Duplex Throughput 200Gbps
Packet Rate 100Mpps
TCP Throughput 100Gbps
Latency (1/2 RTT) <3us
OVS Performance(1) 100Gbps
Flow Table Entries 4 M stateful connections
IPsec Encryption Throughput 100Gbps (AES-GCM)
Dimensions
Height FHHL PCIe CEM 0.72 inch (18.3 mm)
Length 6.59 inch (167.5 mm)
Width 4.38 inch (111.15 mm)
Networking
Stateless Offloads Yes
Tunneling Offloads VXLAN / NVGRE / Custom
SR-IOV Yes
Advanced Packet Filtering Yes
Acceleration TCPDirect – TCP/UDP, Open Virtual Switch (OVS), Virtio-net, vDPA, DPDK, Onload™, Virtio-blk,  Ceph RBD Client Offload
Manageability
PMCI Protocols NC-SI, PLDM Monitoring and Control, PLDM MCTP
PMCI Transports MCTP SMBus, MCTP PCIe VDM
Boot Support UEFI
Power and Thermal
Maximum Total Power 75W
Software Plugins
Software and FPGA Extensibility via Dynamically Loadable Plugins Yes
Tool Support
Vitis Developer Environment Yes
Documentation
Default Default Title Document Type Date
Acceleration Software

Onload™ - Application Acceleration Software

Onload™ dramatically accelerates and scales network-intensive applications such as in-memory databases, software load balancers, and web servers. With Onload, data centers can support 400% or more users on their cloud network while delivering improved reliability, enhanced quality of service (QoS) and higher return on investment, without modification to existing applications.

Onload allows data centers to realize:

  • Improved elasticity and efficiency, leading to a lower total cost of ownership (TCO)
  • Increased peak transaction rates, eliminating service brownouts
  • Reduced network jitter with greater response times, equating to superior quality of service

Features:

  • Add 400% or more users
  • Improve messagerates by 100%
  • Minimize server footprint 25%
  • Reduce Latency by 50%
  • Experience near zero jitter
  • Maxmize capex & opex
  • Enhance quality of service

Extending Data Center Investments

Onload delivers a return on capex investments by allowing data centers to redeploy 25% or more of their load-balancing servers for other tasks. Alternatively, data centers can attain a reduction in operational expenses (opex) by shrinking the overall server footprint.

Use Case Application(s) Performance Increase Benchmark Documents
In-Memory Databases Couchbase, Memcached, Redis 100%
Software Load Balancers NGINX Plus, HAProxy 400%
Web Servers/ Applications NGINX Plus, Netty.io 50%

How Fast Can Your Applications Go?

Onload accelerates nearly all network-intensive TCP-based applications. Typical performance improvements when utilizing Onload include:

AMD has produced a series of cookbooks that outline the servers we used, the configuration done, and exactly what testing was completed. The purpose of these cookbooks is to enable customers to reproduce the results obtained, as sometimes they can appear somewhat remarkable.

To obtain a copy, contact us.


Ensuring Uptime and Network Compatibility

Onload is built from the same I/O software technology that powers nearly every financial market and high-frequency trading application on the planet. POSIX compliant, Onload ensures compatibility with TCP-based applications, management tools, and network infrastructures. In addition, Onload provides RDMA-like performance without requiring a forklift upgrade to the data center’s network infrastructure and can be deployed across x86-based platforms running Linux – bare metal, virtual machine or container.