It's hard for me to see the use case of an FPGA nic. The reasons outlined above don't seem compelling when a commodity nic like mellanox do so much more already.
Mellanox NICs (and basically all commercial NICs) do not do what we want. Software is not precise enough, and is on the wrong side of the NIC hardware queues. The whole point of Corundum is to get control of the hardware transmit scheduler on the NIC itself.
Corundum was originally geared more towards optical circuit switching applications, but it's certainly not limited to that. Since it's open source, the transmit scheduler can be swapped out for all sorts of NIC and protocol related research.
Yeah, I suppose that's a valid use case. Things like ixia need to be fpga-based to measure absolute latency without any uncertainty. You cannot currently get that with enough flexibility in commodity cards.
