I got a couple good questions directly, and wanted to repost here since I’m sure others are interested.
Q1: CHI@UC has Xilinx U280 FPGAs, are they connected to the network?
Q2: Can they be used along with layer 2 stitching to connect to FABRIC?
A:
The FPGAs are not yet network connected, but it’s coming “soon”.
The current blocker is that CHI@UC and FABRIC aren’t directly connected, instead traffic passes through some shared infrastructure at ANL and Starlight, and a subset of this shared infra is also used for CHI@UC’s publicly routable traffic (SSH-ing to your instances, accessing the API, and so on).
We’re working to get these paths separated, before we hook up the 100g ports on the FPGAs.
Second, Layer 2 stitching will work with these (once connected), the same as it does for other nodes. Any updates to this will land in the docs as well as the usual changelog announcements.
With that context, I wanted to ask what folks are looking to do with these FPGAs and network connections, so we can better support that experiment category 