NVIDIA announced Bluefield-2 DPUs, its new family of data processing units that support the new DOCA software, a new infrastructure that promises increased networking, storage and security performance.
This new hardware is optimized to reduce CPU load on network tasks and is expected to further accelerate data center performance. The DPUs are fully programmable and feature “zero-trust” security to prevent data breaches and cyber-attacks.
According to the company, a single BlueField 2 DPU can provide the same data center services, which can consume up to 125 CPU cores. This frees CPU cores to run a variety of other business applications. Nvidia’s current DPU line includes two PCIe products: The Blue-Field-2 and the Blue-Field-2X.
It has all the functions of the Nvidia Mellanox ConnectX-6 Dx SmartNIC and additionally powerful ARM cores. Fully programmable, it offers data transfer rates of 200 Gigabit per second and accelerates the most important security, network and storage tasks in the data center.
This variant has all the key features of a BlueField 2-DPU, plus the AI capabilities of amp CPUs that can be used for data center security, networking, and storage applications.
The DPU is capable of performing real-time security analysis using AI, such as identifying irregular traffic that could indicate the theft of sensitive data, analyzing encrypted traffic at line speed, host introspection to identify malicious activity, and automated response.
And what is DOCA software?
NVIDIA’s DOCA enables developers to create software for DPU-accelerated data center infrastructure services in the same way that the CUDA programming model ensures that developers create GPU-accelerated software. It is now available to those who participate in Early Access.
Leading server manufacturers, including ASUS, Atos, Dell Technologies, Fujitsu, Gigabyte, H3C, Inspur, Lenovo, Quanta / QCT, and Supermicro, are planning to integrate NVIDIA CPUs into their enterprise servers.
The BlueField 2 DPUs are currently being tested and are expected to be introduced in 2021 in new systems from leading server manufacturers. BlueField-2X DPUs are under development and should be available next year.