I saw it was from UCSD but that in itself wasn't an answer. There are plenty of things that are usable in production that are built by research groups initially.
SDN isn't the answer either unless these FPGAs can be used directly in production and so there's a path for network cards to no longer being built on dedicated hardware. So to clarify my question I could see this being:
1) A pure research effort on network card hardware design. Useful to test things in a lab and publish papers.
2) Something that can be pushed into production by actually shipping an FPGA in the router, perhaps in specialized situations where the fixed hardware isn't flexible enough.
3) A step before actual hardware can be manufactured, and network cards themselves become a whitebox style business where multiple generic vendors show up because the designs are open-source.
SDN isn't the answer either unless these FPGAs can be used directly in production and so there's a path for network cards to no longer being built on dedicated hardware. So to clarify my question I could see this being:
1) A pure research effort on network card hardware design. Useful to test things in a lab and publish papers.
2) Something that can be pushed into production by actually shipping an FPGA in the router, perhaps in specialized situations where the fixed hardware isn't flexible enough.
3) A step before actual hardware can be manufactured, and network cards themselves become a whitebox style business where multiple generic vendors show up because the designs are open-source.
Either is interesting.