Oct 06, 2020 12:00:00

NVIDIA Announces New Data Center DPU 'Blue Field-2', Shipment Scheduled for 2021

NVIDIA has released the latest information on the project about '

DPU ', a processor for data centers. NVIDIA acquired Mellanox in April 2020, and has announced that it will ship a new DPU, the BlueField-2 DPU , in 2021 based on the assets gained from this acquisition.

NVIDIA BlueField-2 DPUs Set to Ship In 2021, Roadmaps BlueField-3 & 4 By 2023
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16139/nvidia-bluefield2-dpus-set-to-ship-in-2021-roadmaps-bluefield34-by-2023

Mellanox is an idea using the next-generation Smart NIC , a computing unit 'Blue Field-2' that can offload various tasks such as SDN and storage from the host system by combining network equipment and powerful ARM- based SoC. Has been developed. NVIDIA will release this 'Blue Field-2' in 2021 as its latest DPU series.

The 'Blue Field-2 DPU,' which NVIDIA is developing to ship in 2021, uses eight

ARM Cortex-A72 and VLIW acceleration engines, each with a Connect X-6 DX NIC for network connectivity. Designed to be paired. AnandTech, a technology media company, said of NVIDIA's next-generation DPU, the Blue Field-2 DPU, 'is the next step in a gradual migration of domain-specific accelerators in the data center, and will bring network storage security workloads to life. A more specialized processor that can be offloaded from the host CPU. '

NVIDIA has been successful in the data center market with its powerful GPU products. As a result, NVIDIA's 'easy-to-understand policy' to develop the BlueField-2 DPU as a server unit that it didn't previously have in its product lineup for greater success in the data center market, AnandTech wrote. I am.

In addition, NVIDIA plans to release two 'BlueField-2 DPU' and 'BlueField-2X DPU' as the BlueField-2 family. The BlueField-2 DPU is the same DPU as a traditional SmartNIC with two 100Gbs Ethernet / InfiniBand ports and also supports storage tasks like NVMe over Fabrics.

On the other hand, the BlueField-2X DPU has a built-in GPU that uses NVIDIA's Ampere architecture, which can achieve even higher speeds via in-network computing. NVIDIA has not disclosed the details of the GPU installed in the BlueField-2X DPU, but if the rendering of the image below is accurate, the memory chip is the same `` GA102'' installed in NVIDIA's high-end video card Can be AnandTech. This allows the BlueField-2X DPU to deliver extremely powerful performance in terms of computing performance.

Please note that NVIDIA's DPU project is not limited to the Blue Field-2 family. Based on the BlueField-2 family, next-generation models 'BlueField-3' and 'BlueField-4' will be released in the future.

BlueField-3 is positioned as an enhanced version of BlueField-2, but BlueField-4 will be the first model to incorporate NVIDIA's influence into core silicon. NVIDIA plans to design a single high-performance DPU called 'Discrete DPU + GPU' that can significantly exceed the BlueField-2 and BlueField-3 designs. In addition, NVIDIA said about BlueField-4, 'We are expecting to achieve AI performance of 400 TOPS.'

In addition, NVIDIA introduced the same strategy as CUDA , which is a software development kit (SDK) for GPU, to DPU, and as SDK for DPU after BlueField-2, 'DOCA (Data-Center-Infrastructure-on-a-Chip Architecture) ) ”Was also announced.

Next-generation DPU made by NVIDIA will be adopted by major server makers around the world such as ASUS, Atos, Dell Technologies, Fujitsu, GIGABYTE, H3C, Inspur, Lenovo, Quanta / QCT, Supermicro for their enterprise server products. It's a schedule.