Next Generation Processors Take Real-Time Processing to a New Level for Data Center Networking, Security and Storage Applications.

Kalray Inc., the pioneer in many-core processing, in conjunction with the Linley Data Center Conference, announced general availability of KONIC-80, a programmable smart NIC based on Bostan, its second generation many-core processor. Kalray’s solutions deliver features for today’s network, security, and storage acceleration requirements.

“Bostan’s unique architecture provides high computing performance with real time processing and low power consumption,” said Jag Bolaria, principal analyst at The Linley Group. “The simpke design of compute cores with a real time NoC provides deterministic and low latency performance that is well suited for various applications, including storage and networking.”
Kalray’s KONIC-80 will support the Open Data Plane (ODP) framework, which is an open source Linaro hosted initiative that is building momentum in the telecom, networking and security industry. ODP provides a full set of APIs that allows users to easily port and offer a complete turnkey solution by porting on top of ODP functions such as Open vSwitch (OVS), MPLS, NVGRE, VXLAN, SSL, IPsec, and TCP along with iSCSI, iSER, or NVMEoF.

Data Center Storage is in need of performance optimized inftrastructure
Data center storage is going through a profound revolution. SSDs are replacing HDDs in increasing numbers. A remote storage server has to implement Millions of I/O Operations Per Seconds (MIOPS), which consists of reading or writing variable size blocks of data into the SSD. Bostan is an effective solution to handle all those operations in parallel thanks to its high speed integrated interfaces (2X 40GbE and 2X-8 lanes Gen3 PCIe end point or root complex) connected to its 288 cores processing array.

“Kalray is committed to keeping pace with fast changing needs of next generation data center systems for increased performance, better encryption capabilities, lower power consumption, and increased flexibility, ” said Eric Baissus, Kalray CEO. “Our Bostan high speed I/O processor is getting strong traction in the storage data center market place as we are in discussion with most of the key storage servers manufacturers to desgin our processor in their various offerings.”

Kalray has great opportunities in the storage domain area ranging from the integrated storage server and the storage server smart NIC, to the crypto and compression offloading board and the RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) card controller. Kalray will announce those individual storage use cases in the near future.

Product Highlights
KONIC-80 is a single width, half-lenght PCIe programmable card thal allows users to support new functionalities and protocols in a few weeks as opposed to almost one year with competition boards that are based on ASICs. it supports 2 x 40GbE ports and consumes maximum 35W.

At the heart of the smart NIC is Bostan, which is one of the few embedded processors capable of proessing on the fly 2 x 40GbE full duplex line rate thanks to a fully deterministic and low latency architecture integrating 288 C/C++ programmable CPU cores and 128 crypto co-processors. Bostan can feed the internal processing array with 190 million packets per second (Mpps) and execute up to 3,300 instructions per packet at this rate. This is enough to perform extra functions such as compression or encryption in addition to basic L2-L7 routing.