A Reconfigurable and Programmable Gigabit Ethernet Network Interface Card

RiceNIC is a reconfigurable and programmable Gigabit Ethernet network interface card (NIC). It is an open platform meant for research and education into network interface design. The NIC is implemented on a commercial FPGA prototyping board that includes two Xilinx FPGAs, a Gigabit Ethernet interface, a PCI interface, and both SRAM and DRAM memories. The Xilinx Virtex-II Pro FPGA on the board also includes two embedded PowerPC processors. RiceNIC provides significant computation and storage resources that are largely unutilized when performing the basic tasks of a network interface. The remaining processing and storage resources are available to customize the behavior of RiceNIC. This capability and flexibility makes RiceNIC a valuable platform for research and education into current and future network interface architectures.