NVIDIA Unveils Data Center Infrastructure Processing Unit, BlueField-3

Jensen Huang
Founder and CEO of NVIDIA, Jensen Huang, said that a new type of chipset, designed to process data center infrastructure software is required to accelerate and offload the tremendous compute loads.

NVIDIA has announced a brand-new data processing unit named NVIDIA BlueField-3 DPU. The DPU would deliver “powerful” software-defined networking, cybersecurity acceleration, and storage capabilities available for data centers.

BlueField-3 allows enterprises to provide applications at any scale with data center security and “industry-leading” performance as the DPU is created for artificial intelligence (AI) and accelerated computing. The DPU is optimized for cloud-native environments, multi-tenant, hardware-accelerated networking, storage, offering software-defined management and security services at a data-center scale. A single BlueField-3 DPU offers equivalent data center services of up to 300 CPU cores, freeing up important CPU cycles to run business-critical applications.

Founder and CEO of NVIDIA, Jensen Huang, said that modern hyper scale clouds are driving a fundamentally new architecture for data centers. He further mentioned that a new type of chipset, designed to process data center infrastructure software is required to accelerate and offload the tremendous compute load of networking, virtualization, security, cloud-native AI services, and storage. He concluded his statement by saying that the time for BlueField DPU has arrived.

BlueField-3 DPU transforms the old school infrastructure into ‘zero-trust’ environments in which every data center is authenticated. The process is executed with the help of offloading and isolating data center infrastructure from business applications. This thing also secures various enterprises from cloud to core to edge while boosting performance and efficiency.

BlueField-3 would offer high networking performance with the industry’s first 400GbE/NDR DPU. It comes with a 10x accelerated compute power of the predecessor, with 16x Armm A78 cores generation PCIe and it also delivers time-synchronized data center acceleration. BlueField-3 offers real-time network visibility, detection, and response for cyber threats and it also acts as an agent, telemetry, or the monitoring unit for NVIDIA Morpheus, AI-enabled, state-of-the-art, cloud-native cybersecurity.

Data-Center-On-A-Chip Architecture

BlueField-3 takes complete leverage of NVIDIA DOCA and the data-center-on-a-chip architecture that gives developers a full-fledged open software platform for creating software-defined, hardware-accelerated networking, security, storage, and management applications running on BlueField DPUs. DOCA consists of a runtime environment to build, compile and optimize applications for the BlueField DPU. It has been released today and will be available for download.

Industry leading server manufacturers like Dell Technologies, Lenovo, Supermicro, and Inspur are integrating BlueField DPUs into their systems. Cloud service providers over the globe are using BlueField DPUs to accelerate workloads, including JD.com, UCloud, and Baidu. The BlueField ecosystem is also growing with BlueField-3 support from hybrid cloud platform partners Red Hat, VMware, and Canonical; edge platform providers like F5, Cloudflare, and Juniper Networks; cybersecurity leaders Fortinet, Guardicore; storage providers DDN, NetApp, and WekaIO.

NVIDIA BlueField-3 is compatible with BlueField-2 that offers unparalleled performance for offloading, isolating, accelerating data center workloads. BlueField-2 is available with a dual 1000Gb/s Ethernet or InfiniBand network porta and up to eight ARM cores. The BlueField-2 DPU comes equipped with accelerators for software defined storage, security, streaming, networking, line rate TLS/IPSEC cryptography, precision timing for 5G telco, cloud infrastructure services, and time-synchronized data.