UCF Announces the OpenSNAPI Project

The Unified Communication Framework (UCF) has announced a new project to develop an open-standard API for smart networking adapters. The OpenSNAPI project will focus on accessing the compute engines on the network – specifically on a smart network adapter.

According to the project website, “New technologies continue to be developed to support the migration of the data center architecture from the old CPU-centric concept to the data-centric concept. An important part of this transition has involved the creation of new compute options, including smart and programmable interconnect solutions, also referred to as SmartNICs or IPUs (I/O Processing Units)…The combination of CPUs, GPUs, and IPUs creates the next generation of data center and edge computing architectures. IPUs include smart network switches and smart network adapters. The OpenSNAPI project mission is to create a standard application programming interface (API) for accessing the compute cores on the network, and specifically on the network adapter. OpenSNAPI allows application developers to leverage the network compute cores in parallel to the host compute cores, for accelerating application run time, and to perform data operations closer to the data.”

UCF board member and Los Alamos distinguished scientist Steve Poole invites other developers to join the effort, “Our goal with OpenSNAPI is to further enable application developers to leverage the network compute cores in parallel to the host compute cores for accelerating application runtime, and to perform operations and processing much closer to the data. We invite the industry and academia to join us in this important endeavor.”

For more information, see the OpenSNAPI website.