05-07-26: Today, I caught up with an old friend, Ron Renwick, and the team from Xelera Felix Winterstein, the CEO, and Andrea Suardi, Head of Acceleration, to discuss their new Silva offering and how they are bringing AI inference to the network edge. Recently, the Xelera team completed the STAC-ML™ Markets (Inference) benchmark audit on a stack that includes a STAC-ML™ Pack for Xelera Silva with AMD Alveo™ V80 on an HPE Proliant DL385 Gen10 Plus v2 server. For context, here are some highlights from this report:

Table of Contents

We spent 30 minutes talking with Alex Stein, the CEO of Liquid Market Solutions, about SmartNICs, Network Attached Compute, AI, White Rabbit, and a whole host of other topics. See the Table of Contents below for more details.

Table of Contents
00:00 Hello & Welcome.
00:14 Introduction to Alex Stein and Liquid Market Solutions (LMS).
02:00 History, four startups, one DE Shaw-backed, and the path to 2Sigma.
02:40 2Sigma and building Alpha Capture.
05:20 Meeting Seth at Morgan Stanley.
06:00 Seth is pushing them towards producing an FPGA-based solution.
06:40 When Scott and Alex may have first met in 2009 while Alex was at 2Sigma.
08:00 How does LMS fit into the larger SmartNIC market?
10:20 A TOE, no session set up, as well as the other protocols.
11:25 Strength of partnerships, while remaining focused on their core differentiation.
12:40 Working with BittWare as a board design partner.
13:30 They have 19 patents around their core technology; they don’t license their IP.
14:30 Packaged their technology to directly address customer problems.
15:10 Network Attached Compute (NAC) from NIC to NAC.
17:10 Taking UberNIC beyond AI. Timestamping, White Rabbit, streaming, telco…
19:00 Working with CERN to synchronize time with a resolution of 20 picoseconds.
19:40 AI as a force multiplier.
22:10 News sentiment portal that leveraged AI, and the value of AI moving forward.
22:40 Challenges of SmartNICs in Financial, the complexity of FPGA programming.
23:40 Activation Energy and what is required to move to a programmable platform.
25:40 Customers can add their own logic on top of UberNIC.
26:50 Power, heat, and the challenges they pose.
28:40 Future timeline, roadmap, and the use of ARM.
29:15 Alex hinted at a possible future ARM-based offering.
29:25 UALink and silicon photonics for chip-to-chip.
30:40 Looking out five years.
32:40 Composable I/O, we’ve heard it before, it will be interesting where it goes.
33:00 CXL and how that fits moving forward. 
34:00 Wrap up and thank you for listening.

03-19-26 We chatted with Jan Korenek, Ph.D., CSO and Co-Founder of DYNANIC, and Lukáš Kekely, Ph.D., CTO of DYNANIC, about DDoS attacks and how to defend against them using various NIC technologies. We talked about Cloudflare and their use of generic ASIC-based NICs in their scrubbing centers, as well as ASIC-based SmartNICs with many ARM cores and FPGA-based SmartNICs.