What is a DPU and why does it matter? DPU vs SmartNIC

Data Processing Units, or DPUs. They seem to be the latest buzz word in datacentre server technology with everybody is talking about them. But what exactly is a DPU - is it a glorified NIC, a new type of SmartNIC? Does it replace the NIC or do I need the DPU as well? And does every server now need one? Find out all you need to know in this introduction to DPUs.
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[@z3rocoo142]

I'm a networking guy and I'd never even heard of a smart NIC. Thanks for the lesson!

[@scanitsolutions]

We're glad to hear it was useful. We'll be releasing an introductory video to networks and another one of switches in a few weeks so it'll be interesting to hear what you think of them. - JG

[@jacksonxie7579]

very good explanation for each term.

[@neelasmr6171]

Great clips ty sir

[@scanitsolutions]

Glad you like them! - JG

[@sahilgupta3564]

Hey, Nice Video.
Can you also make a video on:
A. Cheapest DPU hardware available in market
B. Any open source programming language and compiler that can be used for instructing DPU to process network packets in certain ways? I heard P4 language is dominating this space but doesn't find any solid material on it.
C. Any training program available that we can take to learn how to program a DPU? Can you make a video series on it? If not please suggest where to look to learn more about it.
D. Some datacenter usecases belonging from network security or networking area.
Thanks in advance.

[@scanitsolutions]

Thanks for the feedback. We'll definitely follow up with more videos on DPUs as the technology and market develops, it seems that almost every week a new DPU is being announced.
In the meantime, we hope this helps with your questions:
A. The DPU market is developing very rapidly at the moment, a good place to start would be an NVIDIA BlueField 2 DPU, due in part to the price and availability but also critically because as you'll see from the answers to your other questions below NVIDIA provides lots of software and training assets to support its hardware products. You can find out more here: www.scan.co.uk/business/nvidia-bluefield-data-it
B. DOCA is the NVIDIA SDK for doing all the Bluefield DPU development based on DPDK. You can find out more here:
www.dpdk.org/
doc.dpdk.org/guides/gpus/cuda.html
developer.nvidia.com/networking/doca
C. NVIDIA provides a free online DLI course on DPU programming: courses.nvidia.com/courses/course-v1:DLI+S-NP-01+V1/
D. Here are a variety of cybersecurity use cases using NVIDIA DPUs and its Morpheus platform:
developer.nvidia.com/morpheus-cybersecurity
blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2021/07/12/palo-alto-networks-cyber-defenses/
developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-introduces-bluefield-dpu-as-a-platform-for-zero-trust-security-with-doca-1-2/
blog.checkpoint.com/2020/10/05/check-point-software-and-nvidia-partner-to-secure-the-datacenter-with-infinity-next/
blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2020/09/29/vmware-bluefield2-dpus/
Good luck with your DPU learning. - JG

[@sahilgupta221]

@@scanitsolutions Thanks a lot for this information. This is really helpful.

[@davidcache]

for the original poster. look into fpga's. xilinx has a few models with hard logic for data processing, good place to start

[@Reth_Hard]

E. What is the recommended amount of DPUs do I need for my Minecraft server?

[@brandonmcnaughton7208]

Thanks for this explanation. Do you reckon this will eventually displace NICs, RAID controllers, and SSD controllers in the datacenter? Great possibilities when paired with composable infrastructure.

[@scanitsolutions]

Thanks for the feedback. It's quite likely that DPUs will replace many NICs in the datacentre over the next few years, but not all workloads require the added management features and performance. Where NICs and SmartNICs will stay around is in the lower network speeds (around 10GbE or so) typically used by SME servers and workstations. - JG

[@anintrestedparty7750]

Interesting video explainer. With more and more processing being done on a DPU, will reliance on system CPUs then reduce? Would you still specify a high core count CPU or dual CPUs if you had a DPU card installed?

[@scanitsolutions]

That's a good question, although CPUs continue to add more cores and features every generation, there's no doubt that dedicated hardware, be it a DPU or a GPU, is almost always faster and more efficient. DPUs are specifically designed to offload network processes from the CPU so for some servers that might mean you can get away with speccing lower-cost CPUs; viewed another way you could keep using high-core count CPUs as all those cores are now free to run more VMs / applications. JG

[@jrm332]

So it works like a GPU but for network traffic instead of video.