Abstract

In the past 20 years, the interconnect rate of networking devices doubled every 18 months, whereas computing systems’ doubled approximately every 24 months. This led to an increasing gap in the performance of networking and computing devices. In this talk I introduce a new computing architecture, dubbed NES , which aims to bridge the performance gap between networking and end-host computers. The architecture, scaling from chip level, through server level, to datacentre level, puts a networking-element at the core of computing devices. It treats data transactions between elements in the system as networking transactions. Consequently, properties of transactions in the networking world can be applied, such as performance guarantees. NES enables multi-terabit computing in affordable hardware, allowing large VM appliances to scale to 10K’s and 100K’s of VMs per machine while enabling in hardware properties such as coherency, performance guarantees and isolation.