Tag: DPU

What Is A Data Processing Unit (DPU) And Why Is NVIDIA Betting On It?

Posted on by [email protected]_84

At the GPU Technology Conference 2020, Jensen Huang, NVIDIA’s CEO, unveiled a new family of processors branded as the BlueField-2 Data Processing Unit (DPU). The DPU is accessible to the developers via the software platform, the DOCA SDK. The DPU and DOCA SDK are comparable to NVIDIA’s powerful combination of GPU hardware and CUDA software.  

Having dominated the AI accelerator market, NVIDIA is now aiming to expand it to the data center infrastructure acceleration and optimization. 

Why is Jensen Huang bullish about the DPU market and how it matters to the enterprise data center? Here is an attempt to explain the evolution of DPU in simple terms.

The Aggregation and Disaggregation of Enterprise Infrastructure

During the 90s, the combination of Intel x86 CPU and OS software offered unmatched power to enterprises. The rise of client/server computing, followed by n-tier computing, paved the way for distributed computing.

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NVIDIA Wants To Change The Game Yet Again With The ‘DPU’

Posted on by [email protected]_84

This week, I tuned into NVIDIA’s annual GPU Technology Conference, or GTC, albeit virtually due to the pandemic. The processor powerhouse has a long history of category-defining innovation, dating back to its launch of the first 3D GPU in 1999. This week’s keynote was chock full of news and innovation, including another all-new processor category designed to muscle NVIDIA into the datacenter market. Let’s take a look at the new processor and several other announcements from GTC 2020.

Look out, data center market

One of the most significant announcements was the unveiling of the DPU (data processing unit)—a whole new category of processors designed to offload networking, security, and storage tasks from CPUs in the data center. Essentially, you can think of these DPUs as smart NICs. Under the new family moniker BlueField, NVIDIA unveiled the first two of these accelerators: the BlueField-2 and the BlueField-2X.

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“DPU” Smart NIC And More

Posted on by [email protected]_84

NVIDIA Co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang rarely disappoints his audience nor his investors. This week he once again delivered the goods at the European GPU Technology Conference. Announcing a broad range of hardware and software innovations, Jensen made it clear that he intends to reshape computation, from GPUs to CPUs to NICs and switches. So, let’s dive into Jensen’s goody bag and see how he plans to shape the market and NVIDIA’s future.

NVIDIA DPU Smart NIC

NVIDIA led off with a new NIC from the Mellanox division. Setting the stage for a reimagining of the server, NVIDIA added multi-core Arm CPUs and AI acceleration to the staid Network Interface Card (NIC). Smart NICs have been around for a while, but have yet to reach broad-scale adoption outside a few hyperscale cloud providers. However, as networking becomes

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