This week, Chris and Martin chat to Kevin Deierling, SVP of Marketing for Networking Products at NVIDIA. SmartNICs and DPUs (Data Processing Units) are starting to become mainstream as application use-cases such as AI and analytics drive a need for greater data throughput and performance. Kevin explains the design and thinking behind BlueField, NVIDIA's family of DPU products that combine offloaded network, storage and security functionality.

Elapsed Time: 00:47:36

Timeline

  • 00:00:00 – Intros 00:01:30 – We're not a networking podcast! 00:02:15 – Why will we need DPUs and SmartNICs? 00:04:30 – Von Neumann is diverging 00:06:50 – What is the BlueField architecture? 00:08:45 – A DPU could act as a storage array controller 00:11:30 – Storage DPUs make devices appear local 00:13:00 – DPUs enable efficient bare-metal server deployments 00:15:00 – Storage, networking & security use around 30% of traditional cores 00:16:00 – Does a DPU represent better or worse performance than CPU? 00:20:15 – NVIDIA DPUs emulate existing devices, reducing application changes 00:25:00 – Where does the outboard management take place? 00:26:00 – DOCA is the application framework for DPUs 00:28:00 – BlueField 2X combines GPU and DPU on the same card 00:31:40 – DPUs enable the real-time nature of data processing 00:35:40 – Mainframe reference! 00:38:00 – Where will initial adoption take place? 00:40:00 – How does the use of SmartNICs affect TCO? 00:45:10 – The future is 1000x improvement with BlueField 4* 00:46:00 – Wrap Up

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