The focus of the ASAN project is to develop hardware and software technologies for the implementation of active system area networks (ASANs). The use of the term "active" refers to the ability of the network interfaces to perform application-specific as well as system level computations in addition to their traditional role of data transfer.
This project adopts the view that the network infrastructure should
be an active computational entity capable of supporting certain classes
of computations which would otherwise be performed on the host CPUs. The
result is a unique network-wide programming model where computations are
dynamically placed within the host CPUs or the NIs depending upon the quality
of service demands and network/CPU resource availability. The projects
seeks to demonstate that such an approach is a better match for data intensive
network-based applications and that the advent of low-cost powerful embedded
processors and configurable hardware makes such an approach economically
viable and desirable.