[e2e] network NIC paper in ASPLOS

[Craig Partridge]

Hi folks:

Given that E2E has been interested for decades in NIC design, I thought
I'd point out the recent paper at ASPLOS, "Integrated Network Interfaces
for High-Bandwidth TCP/IP" by Blinkert, Saidi, and Reinhardt.

Basically they are doing a WITLESS design where the NIC sits on the
CPU chip.  All good fun and basically the result you'd expect based
on the WITLESS, Afterburner and UPENN NIC experience in the early 1990s.
Nice to see good ideas validated in a new context.

Craig

PS: For folks who don't remember WITLESS, Afterburner and the UPENN work.

WITLESS (a Workstation Interface that's Low-Cost, Efficient, Scalable
and Stupid) was presented by Van Jacobson in various talks -- probably
the most accessible is the tutorial notes from SIGCOMM '90.

Afterburner -- Banks and Prudence, "A High Performance Network Architecture
    for a PA-RISC Workstation" IEEE JSAC, February 1993.

UPENN - Traw and Smith, "Hardware/Software Performance Organization of
    a High-Performance ATM Host Interface," IEEE JSAC, February 1993.

[The 1993 JSAC was a special issue on host interface design and has some
other nifty papers, such as the Davie paper on OSIRIS].