Bluefield-3 DPU accelerates virtual clouds, says Nvidia
With 400Gb/s Ethernet or NDR 400Gbits per second InfiniBand network connectivity, BlueField-3 DPU (data processing unit) offloads, accelerates, and isolates software-defined networking, storage, security, and management functions to improve data centre performance, efficiency and security, says Nvidia.
The third-generation Bluefield infrastructure on a chip enables organisations to build software-defined, hardware-accelerated IT infrastructures from cloud to core data centre to edge, says the company. In addition to powerful computing and a range of programmable acceleration engines in the I/O path, BlueField-3 is addresses the infrastructure needs of the most demanding applications and software backwards compatibility through the Nvidia DOCA software framework.
BlueField-3 DPUs transform traditional computing environments into secure and accelerated virtual private clouds, allowing organisations to run application workloads in secure, multi-tenant environments. It decouples data centre infrastructure from business applications and is claimed to deliver optimal bare-metal performance and native support for multi-node tenant isolation.
BlueField-3 DPU features video streaming Storage NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF), NVMe/ TCP, hyper converged infrastructure (HCI), encryption, data integrity, data de-duplication, decompression, erasure coding/RAID Security Distributed firewall, IDS/ IPS, root of trust and microsegmentation.
The portfolio includes one, two or four ports with up to 400Gbits per second connectivity, 16Gbyte on-board DDR5 memory. There is also a 1GbE out-of-band management port, single port InfiniBand or dual ports of NDR200 / HDR (200Gbits per second), 32 lanes of PCIe Gen 5.0 and non-transparent bridging.
The ample memory consists of up to 16 Armv8.2+ A78 Hercules cores (64-bit), 8Mbyte L2 cache and 16Mbyte LLC system cache. There is also a programmable datapath accelerator, DDR DIMM support, including dual DDR5 5600Mtransfers per second DRAM controllers and ECC protection.
For security, there is secure boot with public key accelerator (PKA) root-of-trust, secure firmware update and Flash encryption, MACsec / IPsec / TLS data-in-motion encryption, an AES-GCM 128 / 256-bit key, AES-XTS 256 / 512-bit data-at-rest encryption, connection tracking for stateful firewall and true random number generator (TRNG) storage.
