Distributed computing applications are the major driver of the cloud evolution. Their computing infrastructures have existed in a loosely-coupled, CPU-centric style for several decades, but performance improvements are now declining, due to the slowing of Moore's law, explosive data growth, and unprecedented computational demands. Increasingly, offloading computing and disaggregating resources are becoming the way forward, leveraging specialized network hardware and software to provide reliable, predictable, efficient and high-performance infrastructure. Distributed Adaptive Computing (DAC) extends the existing Xilinx per-server adaptive approach by introducing custom hardware and software interconnection technologies between Xilinx components, to provide uniquely flexible networked solutions to the Big Data challenges, scalable to address the ever-increasing demands. In this presentation, the speaker will report current research towards DAC on the following two aspects. The first is to extend the NIC taxonomy to the "Adaptable NIC", where standard or proprietary protocol processing can be programmed by users to match application needs. The second investigation has pushed adaptivity further to network switches, which has devised a new system architecture called "Adaptable Switch".
Chengchen Hu is a Principal Engineer at Xilinx Inc. and is the founding director of Xilinx Labs Asia Pacific based in Singapore currently leading research on networked processing systems. Prior to joining Xilinx in Aug., 2017, he was a Professor and the Department Head at the Department of Computer Science and Technology, Xi'an Jiaotong University in P. R. China. He received Ph. D. degree in Computer Science from Tsinghua University and is recipient of the New Century Excellent Talents in University award from Ministry of Education, China, a fellowship from the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM), a fellowship of Microsoft "Star-Track" Young Faculty. He severed in the organization committee and technical program committee of many conferences including INFOCOM, IWQoS, ICC, GLOBECOM, ANCS, Networking, APCC, etc. His main research theme is to monitor, diagnose and manage the Internet, the cloud data center networks and the distributed systems through hardware optimized and software defined approaches.