https://www.computerweekly.com/feature/DPU-101-What-are-DPUs-what-do-they-do-and-who-supplies-them
Data processing units (DPUs) have emerged as an important deployment option for datacentres that run heavy data-centric workloads such as artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics processing, and to speed storage input/output (I/O).
DPUs are deployed in servers and are the latest in an evolution of offload hardware that take workload away from central processing units (CPUs), freeing them to concentrate on core application cycles and boost performance there.
Meanwhile, DPUs can handle data transfer, data reduction, security and analytics. Perhaps essential to the rise of the DPU also is the extent to which they can fit with composable infrastructure architectures that knit infrastructure resources from hardware componentry.
And, while DPUs are a growing core hardware component, DPU capability is being built into cloud services, such as those from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. Also, core environments such as VMware have been refactored to take advantage of DPU deployment by customers.
In this article, we look at where DPUs came from, what DPUs do and their benefits, key specifications and who the key DPU suppliers are.
Although the idea of a data processing unit is relatively new, their evolution comes from a long line of offload cards, especially in network acceleration.
These started with basic network interface cards (NICs), to “offload NICs” that freed up CPU cycles while they processed network traffic, to “smart NICs” that took things further into what could be offloaded and introduced an element of programmability.
DPUs are an evolution from smart NICs and bring flexible programmability as part of composable architectures, as well as increased offload capabilities and including storage networking.
A useful way of conceiving DPUs – and graphical processing units (GPUs) for that matter – is the idea of decentralisation. That is, offloading tasks that would formerly have been carried out centrally by the CPU to supplementary hardware aimed at specific tasks. In so doing, DPUs make up for server CPU inefficiencies in data-centric computation and data transfer workloads.
To put a finer point on things, it’s maybe useful to conceive of just how parallelised each of the xPU variants are.
CPUs have relatively few cores aimed at running a few operations at one time, GPUs have more cores and can handle more operations, and DPUs are made with many more cores and are built to handle incredible parallelised sets of workloads.
Whereas a GPU is primarily designed to run heavy computation around graphics rendering (although they have become used for more), a DPU takes things a step further to handle heavily data-intensive tasks, such as movement of data around storage and networking, but also AI and analytics.
A DPU is usually made up of a multi-core CPU, memory and controllers, PCIe sockets, and networking and storage fabric interfaces. DPUs are designed with processor cores and hardware acceleration blocks. DPUs come with their own operating system (OS) that allows them to combine with the primary OS and perform jobs such as encryption, erasure coding and data reduction.
DPUs can connect natively to NVMe storage – and NVMe-over-fabrics – to provide rapid access to very high-speed storage. They also often come with native acceleration for specific workloads like cryptocurrency.
The kind of spec you’d get from a DPU can be seen in Nvidia’s BlueField 3, which comes with up to 400Gbps of Ethernet or Infiniband connectivity, 32 lanes of PCIe Gen 5.0, up to 16 ARM CPU cores, 16 cores in a programmable data path accelerator, 32MB of onboard DDR DRAM, AES encryption, and NVMe-over-fabrics/over-TCP connectivity.
DPU hardware is available from suppliers that include:
15 Nov 2023