In recent years, the use of smart network adapters, also known as SmartNICs, has seen a rapid increase. These adapters offer new capabilities for high-performance computing (HPC) beyond standard packet processing. Examples include data processing units (DPUs) or infrastructure processing units (IPUs) that have evolved into system-on-a-chip’s (SoCs) that can include programmable FPGAs, lightweight processing cores and specialized accelerators. DPUs are primarily used for data center operations such as packet filtering, I/O acceleration and security, but there is also growing interest in using them to accelerate HPC applications by offloading communication, I/O management and even part of the application computational workload to them.

This workshop brings together experts from the HPC community, including representatives from national laboratories, HPC vendors and international research centers, to share their knowledge and insights on how DPUs can be leveraged to accelerate HPC applications. In addition to presentations on current research and developments, participants will also discuss new trends in DPU design and their potential use cases. Presenters include researchers, tools developers and HPC users, with a keynote speaker to provide an overview of the evolution of SmartNICs and why they are becoming increasingly important in today’s computing landscape.