We have heard of CPUs and TPUs, now, NVIDIA with the help of its recent acquisition Mellanox is bringing a new class of processors to power up deep learning applications DPUs or data processing units.<\/p>\n
DPUs or Data Processing Units, originally popularised by Mellanox, now wear a new look with NVIDIA; Mellanox was acquired by NVIDIA earlier this year. DPUs are a new class of programmable processor that consists of flexible and programmable acceleration engines which improve applications performance for AI and machine learning, security, telecommunications, storage, among others.<\/p>\n
The team at Mellanox has already deployed the first generation of BlueField DPUs in leading high-performance computing, deep learning, and cloud data centres to provide new levels of performance, scale, and efficiency with improved operational agility.<\/p>\n
The improvement in performance is due to the presence of high-performance, software programmable, multi-core CPU and a network interface capable of parsing, processing, and efficiently transferring data at line rate to GPUs and CPUs.<\/p>\n
According to NVIDIA, a DPU can be used as a stand-alone embedded processor. DPUs are usually incorporated into a SmartNIC, a network interface controller. SmartNICs are ideally suited for high-traffic web servers.<\/p>\n
A DPU based SmartNIC is a network interface card that offloads processing tasks that the system CPU would normally handle. Using its own on-board processor, the DPU based SmartNIC may be able to perform any combination of encryption\/decryption, firewall, TCP\/IP and HTTP processing.<\/p>\n
The CPU is for general-purpose computing, the GPU is for accelerated computing and the DPU, which moves data around the data centre, does data processing.<\/p>\n
These DPUs are known by the name of BlueField that have a unique design that can enable programmability to run at speeds of up to 200Gb\/s. The BlueField DPU integrates the NVIDIA Mellanox Connect best-in-class network adapter, encompassing hardware accelerators with advanced software programmability to deliver diverse software-defined solutions.<\/p>\n
Organisations that rely on cloud-based solutions, especially can benefit immensely from DPUs. Here are few such instances, where DPUs flourish: <\/p>\n
Bare metal environment is a network where a virtual machine is installed<\/p>\n
The shift towards microservices architecture has completely transformed the way enterprises ship applications at scale. Applications that are based on the cloud have a lot of activity or data generation, even for processing a single application request. According to Mellanox, one key application of DPU is securing the cloud-native workloads.<\/p>\n
For instance, Kubernetes security is an immense challenge comprising many highly interrelated parts. The data intensity makes it hard to implement zero-trust security solutions, and this creates challenges for the security team to protect customers data and privacy.<\/p>\n
As of late last year, the team at Mellanox stated that they are actively researching into various platforms and integrating schemes to leverage the cutting-edge acceleration engines in the DPU-based SmartNICs for securing cloud-native workloads at 100Gb\/s.<\/p>\n
According to NVIDIA, a DPU comes with the following features:<\/p>\n
Know more about DPUs here.<\/p>\n
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\nWhat Are DPUs And Why Do We Need Them - Analytics India Magazine<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"