They already have a dedicated PCIe card -- it's the standard 10GigE NIC they're using.
What they're doing is bypassing the kernel overhead of header parsing, demultiplexing and copying to user space. Instead, the network card's ring buffers are mapped directly into the user processes' address space.
The application is almost certainly still talking TCP/IP (or maybe UDP), and there are no changes at the physical layer at all. It isn't a case of a file descriptor being hooked up to generate voltages on a cable at all -- in fact, the overhead of read()/write() calls on a file descriptor is one of the things they're trying specifically to avoid!
http://dpdk.org/ is an open-source library to implement this kind of thing, mostly aimed at Intel NICs.
What they're doing is bypassing the kernel overhead of header parsing, demultiplexing and copying to user space. Instead, the network card's ring buffers are mapped directly into the user processes' address space.
The application is almost certainly still talking TCP/IP (or maybe UDP), and there are no changes at the physical layer at all. It isn't a case of a file descriptor being hooked up to generate voltages on a cable at all -- in fact, the overhead of read()/write() calls on a file descriptor is one of the things they're trying specifically to avoid!
http://dpdk.org/ is an open-source library to implement this kind of thing, mostly aimed at Intel NICs.