[alexforencich]

Original motivation is to support optical switching research for datacenter networking applications. The research group web page is here: https://circuit-switching.sysnet.ucsd.edu/ . It is also mentioned in these slides: https://arpa-e.energy.gov/sites/default/files/UCSD_Papen_ENL.... However, the design is very generic and should be interesting to applications outside optical switching. The main point was to get control over the transmit scheduler, coupled with a very large number of hardware transmit queues. There are a number of experimental protocols and similar that could benefit from this vs. implementation in DPDK.

It is still in development; not sure if I would trust it yet for production workloads. We will not be producing hardware; the design runs on pretty much any board that has the correct interfaces, including many FPGA dev boards and commercially available FPGA-based NICs such as the Exablaze X10 and X25.