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NVIDIA BlueField-2 DPU provides innovative acceleration, security, and efficiency in every host. BlueField-2 data center infrastructure combines the power of the NVIDIA ConnectX®-6 Dx with programmable Arm® cores and hardware offloads for software-defined storage, networking, security, and management workloads.
NVIDIA BlueField-2 also delivers superior performance, security, and reduced TCO for cloud computing platforms, enabling organizations to efficiently build and operate virtualized, containerized, and bare-metal infrastructures at massive scale.
Nvidia BlueField DPU architecture
Figure 7. Bluefield 2 DPU Architecture
The Nvidia BlueField architecture melds a NIC subsystem (based on ConnectX®-6 Dx) with a programmable data path, hardware accelerators for cryptography, compression, reg-ex, and an Arm® (an array of Arm® cores) complex for the control plane. Unlike CPUs, DPUs are purpose-built for network-packet processing, most include programmable data planes and processor cores for control-plane and application code. The DPU’s dedicated data path is not only more efficient than using CPU cores, but also far more performant. For network functions, the DPU accelerates advanced data-center SDN and network-function virtualization (NFV), including Open vSwitch, overlay protocols (such as VXLAN), network-address translation (NAT), load balancing, and fine-grained traffic management. For storage functions, the DPU accelerates RoCE (RDMA), NVMe-oF, data-at-rest encryption, data deduplication, distributed error correction, and data compression. While offloads free server-CPU cores for application processing, DPUs can also improve system security by isolating the application domain from the infrastructure services domain. Cloud-service providers use this isolation to deliver bare-metal compute instances, hiding network and storage virtualization from the virtual server. This “air gap” between the host operating system and DPU-based services also protects the infrastructure from malware attacks launched on virtual servers within the data center.
The NVIDIA® BlueField® DPU operates in 3-modes as described below: