NVIDIA today announced the NVIDIA BlueField-3 DPU, its next-generation data processing unit, to deliver the most powerful software-defined networking, storage and cybersecurity acceleration capabilities available for data centers.
The first DPU built for AI and accelerated computing, BlueField-3 lets every enterprise deliver applications at any scale with industry-leading performance and data center security. It is optimized for multi-tenant, cloud-native environments, offering software-defined, hardware-accelerated networking, storage, security and management services at data-center scale.
One BlueField-3 DPU delivers the equivalent data center services of up to 300 CPU cores, freeing up valuable CPU cycles to run business-critical applications.
“Modern hyperscale clouds are driving a fundamental new architecture for data centers,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “A new type of processor, designed to process data center infrastructure software, is needed to offload and accelerate the tremendous compute load of virtualization, networking, storage, security and other cloud-native AI services. The time for BlueField DPU has come.”
BlueField-3 and Morpheus Put Security Everywhere
BlueField-3 DPUs transform traditional infrastructure into “zero-trust” environments — in which every data center user is authenticated — by offloading and isolating data center infrastructure from business applications. This secures enterprises from cloud to core to edge while increasing efficiency and performance.
The industry’s first 400GbE/NDR DPU, BlueField-3 delivers unmatched networking performance. It features 10x the accelerated compute power of the previous generation, with 16x Arm A78 cores and 4x the acceleration for cryptography. BlueField-3 is also the first DPU to support fifth-generation PCIe and offer time-synchronized data center acceleration.
BlueField-3 provides real-time network visibility, detection and response for cyber threats and acts as the monitoring, or telemetry, agent for NVIDIA Morpheus, a state-of-the-art, AI-enabled, cloud-native cybersecurity platform, also announced today.
NVIDIA DOCA SDK 1.0
BlueField-3 takes advantage of NVIDIA DOCA™, the data-center-on-a-chip architecture that gives developers a complete, open software platform for building software-defined, hardware-accelerated networking, storage, security and management applications running on BlueField DPUs.
Released today and available for download, DOCA includes a runtime environment to create, compile and optimize applications for the BlueField DPU; orchestration tools to provision, update and monitor thousands of DPUs across the data center; as well as libraries, APIs and a growing number of applications, such as deep packet inspection and load balancing.
Ecosystem Adoption of NVIDIA DPUs
Leading server manufacturers Dell Technologies, Inspur, Lenovo and Supermicro are integrating BlueField DPUs into their systems. Cloud service providers across the world are using BlueField DPUs to accelerate workloads, including Baidu, JD.com and UCloud. The BlueField ecosystem is also expanding with BlueField-3 support from leading hybrid cloud platform partners Canonical, Red Hat and VMware; cybersecurity leaders Fortinet, Guardicore and storage providers DDN®, NetApp and WekaIO; and edge platform providers Cloudflare, F5 and Juniper Networks.
“Red Hat continues to collaborate with NVIDIA as part of an open ecosystem that accelerates innovation while providing access to the latest hardware innovations for composable infrastructure,” said Chris Wright, chief technology officer of Red Hat. “We recognize the need to develop advanced solutions for network security and automation and are excited to support BlueField DPUs and the NVIDIA Morpheus AI framework via Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat OpenShift, industry-leading containers and Kubernetes-powered hybrid cloud platform.”
“Our mutual customers are racing to harness the power of AI for enterprise applications,” said Lee Caswell, vice president of marketing for the Cloud Platform Business Unit at VMware. “The vision of enterprise infrastructure powered by the VMware Cloud Foundation and to be certified with the newly announced NVIDIA BlueField-3 DPU shows customers a path to improved application performance, a consistent operating model across virtualized and bare-metal environments, along with a new model for delivering zero-trust security without compromising performance.”
BlueField-2 Now Available
BlueField-3 is fully backward-compatible with BlueField-2, which provides unparalleled performance for offloading, accelerating and isolating data center workloads. BlueField-2 is generally available with dual 100Gb/s Ethernet or InfiniBand network ports and up to eight Arm cores. The BlueField-2 DPU includes accelerators for software-defined storage, networking, security, streaming, line rate TLS/IPSEC cryptography, precision timing for 5G telco and time-synchronized data centers and other cloud infrastructure services.
Availability
BlueField-3 is expected to sample in the first quarter of 2022.
