DARPA: Our goal is 100x faster network card for tomorrow's AI ZDNet

DARPA wants to break a network speed bottleneck caused by network interface cards (NICs) that aren't cut out to support tomorrow's demands for artificial intelligence. To achieve its goal, the Department of Defense agency is launching the Fast Network Interface Cards (FastNICs) program. The FastNIC isn't a technology just yet, but DARPA's FastNICs program is seeking engineering talent to help achieve its ambition to boost the performance of the network stack on servers by 100 times. SEE: Sensor'd enterprise: IoT, ML, and big data (ZDNet special report) Download the report as a PDF (TechRepublic) As DARPA explains, networking performance has tracked the same path as computing performance explained by Moore's Law. But NICs, the hardware that connects the computer to an Ethernet network, have not kept pace and, with a few other factors like memory and software design, application throughput is too slow for the future of AI and distributed computing.