DPUs debut to complement CPUs and GPUs

NVIDIA has announced a new kind of processor with new functionality to complement central processing units (CPUs) and graphics processing units (GPUs). DPUs, or data processing units, supported by DOCA, a novel data-centre-infrastructure-on-a-chip architecture, are designed to enable breakthrough networking, storage and security performance. 

A single BlueField-2 DPU can deliver the same data centre services that typically consume up to 125 CPU cores. This frees up CPU resources to run other enterprise applications. NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang revealed the company’s three-year DPU roadmap at the NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference (GTC) keynote on October 5. 

The NVIDIA DPU roadmap stretches to 2023 with the expected launch of BlueField-4, which is expected to have a 1,000x increase in performance over BlueField-2.

The company will provide the NVIDIA BlueField-2 family of DPUs and NVIDIA DOCA software development kit (SDK) for building applications on DPU-accelerated data centre infrastructure services. 

“The data centre has become the new unit of computing,” said Huang. “DPUs are an essential element of modern and secure accelerated data centres in which CPUs, GPUs and DPUs are able to combine into a single computing unit that’s fully programmable, AI-enabled and can deliver levels of security and compute power not previously possible.” 

Optimised to offload critical networking, storage and security tasks from CPUs, BlueField-2 DPUs enable organisations to transform their IT infrastructure into state-of-the-art data centres that are accelerated, fully programmable and armed with zero trust security features to prevent data breaches and cyberattacks. 

Leading server manufacturers worldwide — including ASUS, Atos, Dell Technologies, Fujitsu, GIGABYTE, H3C, Inspur, Lenovo, Quanta/QCT and Supermicro — have plans to integrate NVIDIA DPUs into their enterprise server offerings. These commitments from system providers are supported by software infrastructure partners: 

 - VMware announced substantial work is underway with NVIDIA as part of its recently-announced Project Monterey initiative to support BlueField-2 DPUs with VMware Cloud Foundation. 

 - Red Hat plans to offer support for BlueField-2 DPUs with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat OpenShift, components of Red Hat’s open hybrid cloud portfolio that is used by 95% of the Fortune 500. 

- Canonical announced support of BlueField-2 DPUs and DOCA in its Ubuntu Linux platform, the most popular operating system among public clouds. 

- Check Point Software Technologies, the cybersecurity provider, is integrating BlueField-2 DPUs into its technologies, which more than 100,000 organisations worldwide use to protect themselves from cyberattacks. 

NVIDIA’s current DPU lineup includes two PCIe products: 

- The NVIDIA BlueField-2 DPU, which features all of the capabilities of the NVIDIA Mellanox ConnectX-6 Dx SmartNIC combined with powerful Arm cores. Fully programmable, it delivers data transfer rates of 200 Gbps and accelerates key data centre security, networking and storage tasks, including isolation, root trust, key management, RDMA/RoCE*, GPUDirect, elastic block storage, data compression and more. 

- The NVIDIA BlueField-2X DPU includes all the key features of a BlueField-2 DPU and is also enhanced with an NVIDIA Ampere GPU’s AI capabilities. NVIDIA is positioning this hardware for data centre security, networking and storage tasks. 

Drawing on NVIDIA’s third-generation Tensor Cores, it is able to use AI for real-time security analytics, including identifying abnormal traffic, which could indicate theft of confidential data, encrypted traffic analytics at line rate, host introspection to identify malicious activity, and dynamic security orchestration as well as automated responses. 

The new NVIDIA DOCA SDK enables developers to build applications on DPU-accelerated data centre infrastructure services, much like the NVIDIA CUDA programming model enables developers to build GPU-accelerated applications. DOCA provides developers a comprehensive, open platform for building software-defined, hardware-accelerated networking, storage, security and management applications running on BlueField DPUs.  

DOCA is fully integrated into NVIDIA NGC, a software catalogue offering a containerised software environment for third-party application providers to leverage advanced DPU data-centre-accelerated services and to develop, certify and distribute applications to customers. 

Details:

BlueField-2 DPUs are sampling now and expected to be featured in new systems from leading server manufacturers in 2021. BlueField-2X DPUs are under development and are also expected to become available in 2021. DOCA is available for early access partners now.

*RDMA stands for remote direct memory access while RoCE stands for RDMA over Converged Ethernet. RDMA moves data between servers. RoCE is a network standard that allows RDMA to occur over Converged Ethernet.