Nvidia launches DPUs for infrastructure-on-a-chip

At the virtual Nvidia GTC event, founder and CEO, Jensen Huang announced Bluefield data processing units, or DPUs. They are supported by the company’s DOCA architecture and are intended to dramatically increase the networking, storage and security performance of data centres.

Bluefield-2 bring the power of the GPU, with silicon and adds AI to the network and storage domain Huang explained. It has Tensor cores for analysis functions and uses both network interface controller (NIC) and Arm cores on the same silicon.

The Bluefield-2 DPU combines the Nvidia Mellanox ConnectX-6 DX SmartNic with Arm cores. It can transfer data at up to 200Gbps and accelerates data centre security, networking and storage tasks, for example, isolation, root trust, key management and data compression.

The Bluefield-2X DPU additionally has an Nvidia Ampere GPU bringing AI capabilities to the data centre tasks. It uses third generation Tensor cores for real time security analytics, e.g. detecting abnormal behaviour for intruder detection or data theft.

The DPUs are designed to offload critical networking, storage and security tasks from CPUs, to free them to run other enterprise applications. Huang said the data services available from a single Bluefield-2 DPU was equivalent to 125 CPU cores in a data centre.

The DPUs will be supported by VMware Cloud Foundation, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat OpenShift and both the DPUs and DOCA architecture willbe supported by Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux OS for public cloud services.

A DOCA software development kit (SDK) has also been announced for engineers to build on DPU-accelerated infrastructure services. Huang likened it to the company’s CUDA programming model.

DOCA is an open model architecture for data centre infrastructures, running on the Bluefield DPUs. The software is available for third party application providers to use the accelerated services and develop applications to their customers.

ment for third-party application providers to leverage advanced DPU data-center-accelerated services and to develop, certify and distribute applications to customers. DOCA is available for early access partners now.

Bluefield-2 is sampling now, for use in servers in 2021. Bluefield-2x is under development with expected availability in 2021. The company has released a roadmap to increase capacity by around 600x, with the present 40TOPs performance increasing by 2023. Bluefield-3 and Bluefield-3x will be introduced in 2022.