The Defense Advanced Research Program Agency (DARPA) is initiating a program that aims to accelerated distributed applications and improve network stack performance “by a factor of 100 through the creation of clean-slate networking approaches,” according to a Sept. 26 news release.
DARPA calls the program the Fast Network Interface Cards (FastNICs), which will focus on developing hardware systems that will largely improve aggregate raw server datapath speed. Other research areas within the program will involve developing system software required to manage the FastNICs hardware resources, generating software libraries that are usable by various applications, and exploring applications that “could be enabled by the multiple order of magnitude performance increases provided by the program-generated hardware.”
The FastNICs solicitation is on FedBizOpps, and proposals are due by Oct. 8.