Alveo U280 Data Center Accelerator Card
base line: Mellanox ConnectX-5 Ex 100Gb NIC
Why it matters
Modern cloud servers juggle thousands of microsecond‑scale RPCs from many services. Ideal orchestration (load‑balancing, request scheduling, and fast CPU core re‑allocation) is centralized, but existing software‑only schemes burn cores and stall at high line‑rates. SmartNICs with on‑board ARM cores help little—they are too slow and still add latency. RingLeader asks: what if we push (almost) the entire orchestration logic into the NIC’s datapath hardware?