I have gotten my hands dirty with NVIDIA Bluefield-2 SmartNIC deployed at Cloudlab’s facility @ Clemson. If you ever wondered to buy a Bluefield SmartNIC, now I can show you how to test them and get your first impressions for free.

For some time ago, the networking industry is going through a big revolution. There have been many headlines lately about the end of Moore’s law and how the continuous close-to-exponential improvement of general-purpose processors is degrading. However, the data and the corresponding network traffic are doing the opposite. To efficiently keep up with this increasing data processing need, common network interface cards, a.k.a. NICs, have become programmable. Programmable means that we can offload some parts of the data processing to the NIC (which are thus termed as SmartNIC), thereby alleviating the host CPU to do the actual processing, i.e., data interpretation, visualization, content generation, etc.