NVIDIA revealed the company’s three-year data processing units roadmap in GPU Technology Conference keynote. NVIDIA’s new kind of DPUs are dupported by DOCA, a new Data-Center-Infrastructure-on-a-Chip Software that enables developers to create new DPU-accelerated infrastructure applications. According to the announcement, a single BlueField-2 DPU can deliver the same data center services that could consume up to 125 CPU cores.
DPU Portfolio
BlueField-2 DPUs expected to be featured in new systems from server manufacturers in 2021. BlueField-2X DPUs are under development and are also expected to become available in 2021. DPU lineup includes two PCIe products:
- NVIDIA BlueField-2 DPU, 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 gigabits per second and accelerates key data center security, networking and storage tasks, including isolation, root trust, key management, RDMA/RoCE, GPUDirect, elastic block storage, data compression and more.
- NVIDIA BlueField-2X DPU, includes all the key features of a BlueField-2 DPU enhanced with an NVIDIA Ampere GPU’s AI capabilities that can be applied to data center security, networking and storage tasks. Drawing from 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 and automated response.