Systems and methods for content provisioning are disclosed herein. The system can include memory having a content database, a task database, and a user profile database. The system can include a user device having a first network interface and a first I/O subsystem. The system can include a server that can: receive a user identifier from the user device; retrieve user information from the user profile database, which user information identifies one or several attributes of the user; retrieve user task data from the task database, which user task data identifies a plurality of tasks for completion by the user; automatically generate prioritization data for the plurality of tasks identified by the user task data; select a task based on the prioritization data; and send content relating to the selected task to the user device.

A smart process control switch can implement a lockdown routine to lockdown its communication ports exclusively for use by devices having known physical addresses, enabling the smart process control switch to prevent new, potentially hostile, devices from communicating with other devices to which the smart process control switch is connected. Further, the smart process control switch can implement an address mapping routine to identify known pairs of physical and network addresses for each device communicating via a port of the smart process control switch. Thus, even if a new hostile device is able to spoof a known physical address in an attempt to bypass locked ports, the smart process control switch can detect the hostile device by checking the network address of the hostile device against the expected network address for the known pair.

A method and system for propagating network traffic flows between end points based on service and priority policies. Specifically, the method and system disclosed herein entail configuring network elements with network-disseminated traffic management policies. Each traffic management policy guides the handling of a network traffic flow between origination and termination end points (i.e., source and destination hosts), which may be defined through data link layer, network layer, and/or transport layer header information, as well as group assignment information, associated with the source and destination hosts.

Some examples provide for storage of context information in memory in the process of creating a network connection and subsequent availability of the context information. A context address can refer to context for a packet processing path. A host can provide a context address and associated packet characteristics to a network interface device. If the network interface device receives a packet with the characteristics, the context address can be passed to the host and the host can retrieve the context information using the context address.

An endpoint in a network may make posted or non-posted write requests to another endpoint in the network. For a non-posted write request, the target endpoint provides a response to the requesting endpoint indicating that the write request has been serviced. For a posted write request, the target endpoint does not provide such an acknowledgment. Hence, posted write requests have lower overhead, but they suffer from potential synchronization and resiliency issues. While non-posted write requests do not have those issues, they cause increased load on the network because such requests require the target endpoint to acknowledge each write request. Introduced herein is a network operation technique that uses non-posted transactions while maintaining a load overhead of the network as a manageable level. The introduced technique reduces the load overhead of the non-posted write requests by collapsing and reducing a number of the responses.

Methods and network interface modules for processing packet headers are provided. The method comprises: receiving a packet comprising a header and a payload; generating, using the header, an initial packet header vector (PHV); providing the initial PHV to a pipeline comprising a plurality of processing stages; and processing the initial PHV in the pipeline, wherein the processing comprises, for a current processing stage in the plurality of processing stages: receiving, by the current processing stage, an input PHV, wherein the input PHV (i) is the initial PHV or a modified version of the initial PHV and (ii) comprises one or more flits, and applying a feature to the input PHV to generate an output PHV, including increasing an initial length of the input PHV if the initial length is not sufficient to apply the feature.

This disclosure describes techniques for collecting network parameter data for network switches and/or physical servers and provisioning virtual resources of a service on physical servers based on network resource availability. The network parameter data may include network resource availability data, diagnostic constraint data, traffic flow data, etc. The techniques include determining network switches that have an availability of network resources to support a virtual resource on a connected physical server. A scheduler may deploy virtual machines to particular servers based on the network parameter data in lieu of, or in addition to, the server utilization data of the physical servers (e.g., CPU usage, memory usage, etc.). In this way, a virtual resource may be deployed to a physical server that has an availability of the server resources, but also is connected to a network switch with the availability of network resources to support the virtual resource.

A network element includes ports, a hardware fabric, a packet classifier and control logic. The ports are configured to transmit and receive packets over a network. The fabric is configured to forward the packets between the ports. The packet classifier is configured to receive at least some of the packets and to specify an action to be applied to a packet in accordance with a set of rules. The classifier includes (i) multiple Ternary Content Addressable Memories (TCAMs), each TCAM configured to match the packet to a respective subset of the set of rules and to output a match result, and (ii) circuitry configured to specify the action to be applied to the packet based on match results produced for the packet by the multiple TCAMs, and based on a priority defined among the multiple TCAMs. The control logic is configured to apply the specified action to the packet.

Computing architectures, platforms, and systems are provided herein. In one example, a system is provided. The system includes a communication arrangement for peripheral component interconnect express (PCIe) traffic transferred over a communication fabric. The communication arrangement establishes an expanded address that provides a quantity of port identifiers to a host greater than indicated by a quantity of bits in a port field of the PCIe traffic, where the expanded address employs one or more bits of the PCIe traffic other than the port field. The communication arrangement detects a transfer among the PCIe traffic issued by the host having the expanded address corresponding to a destination. Based on the expanded address, the communication arrangement identifies routing information to route the transfer over the communication fabric to the destination.

In some implementations, a method is provided. The method includes determining a plurality of field sets and a plurality of field set groups. Each field set of the plurality of field sets comprises one or more packet characteristics. Each field set group of the plurality of field set groups comprises one or more field sets from the plurality of field sets. Each field set group is associated with one or more packet classifier rules. The method also includes determining a set of encoded labels for the plurality of field sets based on a set of rule costs and intersections between field set groups. Each encoded label of the set of encoded labels is associated with a respective field set of the plurality of field sets. The method further includes generating a plurality of entries in a memory based on the set of encoded labels. At least one entry comprises an encoded label from the set of encoded labels and at least a portion of a packet classifier rule.