We’re excited to announce a major new release of DYNANIC, introducing line rate stateful processing of network flows – a fundamental building block for advanced networking, security, and telemetry applications.
Alongside this breakthrough feature, the new version adds full support for Silicom ThunderFjord, a high-end FPGA SmartNIC equipped with Altera Agilex™-M and dual 400G ports, connected to the host system via PCI Express Gen5. This makes DYNANIC ready for the most demanding data plane scenarios, from edge processing to hyperscale data centers.
This new DYNANIC release is now available and compatible with a growing set of FPGA cards – the full list is available at: https://dyna-nic.com/try-now/
Smarter Networking with Flow State Tables
The key highlight of this release is the integration of the Flow State Table, a powerful mechanism that allows each network flow to store and maintain its own state throughout multiple incoming packets.
This unlocks entirely new levels of programmability: from tracking per-flow statistics to enabling logic based on historical packet-level behavior. DYNANIC supports storing this state either in on-chip FPGA block memory for ultra-low latency and high performance, or in dedicated external DRAM or HBM to support large-scale flow tables with millions of records.
As a baseline demonstration of this capability, DYNANIC now implements the RTE flow action COUNT, which allows users to associate counters with specific flows, tracking both packet and byte counts. This can be used to:
- Monitor the number of dropped packets per rule,
- Count packets directed to specific DMA queues,
- Generate real-time traffic metrics by IP, subnet, or protocol (e.g., TCP vs. UDP),
- Detect flows that dominate bandwidth (heavy hitters), and many more.
But COUNT is just the beginning; the stateful behavior is extensible and ready for far more advanced update logic.
Key Use Cases: From Security to Smart Flow Control
The ability to track and act upon per-flow state unlocks a wide range of high-impact scenarios across networking, security, monitoring, and traffic steering. With DYNANIC’s new Flow State Table capability, logic that traditionally required complex software orchestration can now be executed directly in hardware, always at line rate.
Cybersecurity & Threat Mitigation
- DoS / DDoS detection: flag and throttle traffic based on packet rate, volume, or connection reuse patterns.
- Stateful firewalling: track session-level activity (e.g., TCP handshake completion) to permit or block connections dynamically.
- Protocol-based filtering: identify and redirect QUIC, DNS-over-HTTPS, or custom-encrypted traffic for deeper inspection.
- Inline threat response: automatically drop, mirror, or reroute a flow once a suspicious condition is met (e.g., too many packets to one IP in a short time).
Flow Shunting (Selective Bypass)
- Initial packet analysis determines whether the entire flow needs further inspection or can be safely bypassed.
- Offload known safe flows from CPU-intensive processing pipelines, saving compute resources.
- Use early indicators (e.g., headers, connection pattern) to classify and fast-track trusted traffic.
Adaptive Sampling & Telemetry
- Sample only the first N packets of a flow for monitoring or anomaly detection.
- Focus analytics on long-lived or high-volume flows, while ignoring ephemeral or noisy traffic.
- Dynamically adjust sampling or logging strategies based on real-time flow behavior.
Load Balancing & Intelligent Service Routing
- Enable session stickiness by tracking flow identity and consistently steering packets to the same backend instance.
- Route flows based on state metrics – e.g., number of packets sent, duration of flow, or QoS priority.
- Implement flow-aware load shedding or preemptive offloading of congested paths.
Inline Flow Telemetry & Observability
- Generate NetFlow/IPFIX-style metrics directly in the NIC, without CPU intervention.
- Identify heavy hitters or asymmetric traffic patterns at line rate.
- Feed flow-level statistics into SIEM or ML pipelines in real time.
Trigger-Based Automation
- Define thresholds per flow (e.g., >1MB of data or >1000 packets) to initiate programmable actions.
- Auto-tag or escalate flows with suspicious or outlier behavior.
- Use idle timeout and liveliness conditions to purge or reclassify inactive flows in hardware.
New Hardware Support
With this release, DYNANIC adds full support for some new hardware. For example, the Silicom ThunderFjord (specs), featuring:
- 2× 400G Ethernet ports, with a wide range of other link speed combinations like 16×10/25GE or even 8x100G
- Altera Agilex™-M FPGA, which also features up to on-chip 32GB HBMe2 memory, providing an unprecedented 2 x 2.6 Tbps HBMe2 bandwidth
- PCI Express Gen5 interface for high-throughput, low-latency data transfer to and from the host system
- Large external DDR5 memory capacity and many more!
This card is an ideal platform for deploying intelligent inline functions in AI networks, secure edge gateways, or core service provider infrastructure.
DYNANIC was successfully demonstrated recently on this card at the FPGA Conference Europe 2025, showcasing real-time and unbeaten performance.
Improved Documentation for Real-World Development
To support all these new capabilities, we have significantly expanded our documentation resources.
The core documentation now includes practical examples for:
- Using the NDP and NDK tools to extract stateful and performance-related metrics from the SmartNIC,
- Boot and initialization processes,
- Data transfer between software and hardware components.
In parallel, a new DPDK-focused developer guide has been introduced, providing:
- Step-by-step implementation of advanced
RTE flowrules on DYNANIC, - Practical code-level patterns to help software developers harness the power of FPGA acceleration,
- A smooth bridge between traditional DPDK software and programmable SmartNIC hardware.
Whether you’re integrating with automation frameworks or exploring advanced telemetry pipelines, the new materials will help you get started faster and go deeper.
Ready to Try?
The new DYNANIC release with these new features and comprehensive documentation is available. NOW!
You can explore supported platforms and request access to the free trial version of DYNANIC here:
👉 https://dyna-nic.com/try-now/
For technical questions, demos, or partnership inquiries, don’t hesitate to contact us:
📩 support@dyna-nic.com
