“To accelerate distributed applications and close the yawning performance gap, DARPA initiated the Fast Network Interface Cards (FastNICs) program. FastNICs seeks to improve network stack performance by a factor of 100 through the creation of clean-slate networking approaches. Enabling this significant performance gain will require a rework of the entire network stack – from the application layer through the system software layer, down to the hardware.”
Source: https://www.technologies.org/?p=4945
Reinventing the Network Stack for Compute-Intensive Applications