On Using Intelligent Network Interface Cards to support Multimedia Applications

The emergence of fast, cheap embedded processors presents the opportunity for inexpensive processing to occur on the network interface. We are investigating how a system design incorporating such an intelligent network interface can be used to support streaming multimedia applications. We are developing an extensible execution environment, called SPINE, that enables applications to compute directly on the network interface and communicate with other applications executing on the host CPU, peer devices, and remote nodes. Using SPINE, we have implemented a video client that executes on the network interface, and transfers video data arriving from the network directly to the region of frame buffer memory representing the applications window. As a result of this system structure the video data is transferred only once over the I/O bus and places no load on the host CPU to display video at aggregate rates exceeding 80 Mbps.