Network Interface Cards as First-Class Citizens

Network performance has improved by over an order-of-magnitude in the past decade. While, the overall system architecture itself has made modification attempts to match such growth, these changes are mostly "Incremental enhancements, tweaks and adjustments" that try to keep the hardware control hierarchy away from the network communication path. However, authors are rapidly reaching a stage where these adjustments are no longer sufficient to allow the network to realize its full capacity without being bottlenecked by the hardware control hierarchy in the system.