US Patent 10892953 Network-based application acceleration

A method for load balancing in a computer network includes receiving application information for an application and information relating to an artificial neural network (NN) computation to be executed by the application. A configuration is derived for one or more network devices based on the application information and the information relating to the NN computation. The configuration is installed in the one or more network devices such that at least one of the network devices on a path of a network packet performs a subset of the NN computation and encodes a result of the subset of the NN computation into a header of the network packet.