Innovation is recognized when it disrupts a market. Network Interface Cards (NICs) have existed since the 1980s, and around the turn of the century, various companies began innovating in this area. Their initial focus was on High-Performance Computing (HPC). While businesses ran on Ethernet, the most powerful HPC clusters in the world were created using Myrinet or Infiniband. The NICs for these networks were architected to bypass the operating system (OS) kernel and communicate directly with HPC applications delivering substantially greater performance. To make this happen, these NICs applied extensive computational resources at the edge of the network, enabling them to offload common communications tasks from the host CPU.
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