Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) has chosen NVIDIA BlueField-3 DPU as the latest addition to its networking infrastructure. This move would provide OCI’s customers with a new way to transfer data center duties from CPUs. BlueField-3 is NVIDIA’s third-generation data processing unit, which enables businesses to create software-defined, hardware-accelerated IT infrastructures across all layers of their operations, from the cloud to the data center to the periphery.
By offloading, accelerating, and isolating infrastructure workloads, BlueField-3 improves performance, efficiency, and security in data centers, freeing up expensive CPU cores to run business applications. By employing BlueField-3, OCI is extending its time-tested method of offloading data center infrastructure tasks from CPUs.
Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, stated that “the age of artificial intelligence requires cloud data center infrastructures to support extraordinary computing requirements.” He added that “NVIDIA’s BlueField-3 DPU enables this advance, transforming traditional cloud computing environments into infrastructure that is accelerated, energy-efficient, and secure to process the demanding workloads of generative artificial intelligence.”
OCI customers can develop and operate applications and services either in the cloud or on premises by leveraging the extensive variety of cloud infrastructure and platform services provided by OCI.
Clay Magouyrk, Executive Vice President of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, stated that “Oracle Cloud Infrastructure offers enterprise customers nearly unparalleled accessibility to AI and scientific computing infrastructure with the power to transform industries.’ He added that “NVIDIA BlueField-3 Data Processing Units are a key component of our strategy to provide state-of-the-art, sustainable cloud infrastructure with extreme performance.”
NVIDIA BlueField DPUs
BlueField-3 serves as the basis for the management layer of the data center, which is responsible for providing cloud and AI services. Tests have shown that servers equipped with NVIDIA BlueField DPUs would consume up to 24 percentage points less electricity than servers that do not contain DPUs.
Compared to the previous generation of BlueField, the DPUs offer communication via Ethernet and InfiniBand at up to 400 gigabits per second, as well as four times the amount of compute capacity, up to four times the rate of encryption acceleration, two times the rate of storage processing, and four times the amount of memory bandwidth. BlueField offers complete backwards interoperability by utilizing the NVIDIA DOCA software architecture.
NVIDIA DOCA would provide developers with advanced, zero-trust security capabilities. These include the ability to construct monitored cloud services that control resource access, authenticate each application and user, separate potentially compromised computers, and assist in protecting data from intrusions and theft.
Overall, the collaboration between NVIDIA and OCI marks a significant step forward in the world of data center acceleration, improving performance, efficiency, and security in data centers while also providing a potent new alternative for transferring data center duties from CPUs.
