Artificial intelligence (AI) has been ramping fast as organizations of all kinds are looking to use the power of AI to drive insightful automation across marketing, finance, customer service, operations and more. But as an emerging and rapidly evolving set of technologies, AI presents unique challenges for IT, where budgets can be strained and team members have to focus on day-to-day business operations.
Dell Technologies is working with NVIDIA to make transformative technology accessible to every enterprise. As part of that, we’re collaborating to enable AI to run freely across multiple clouds, including in the data center and at the edge.
Expanding networking boundaries
An important part of this work is developing innovations designed to meet AI’s insatiable demand for data. A perfect example of this is how Dell Technologies and NVIDIA are pushing the boundaries of networking.
That’s right, networking.
You’re probably aware that Dell PowerEdge servers with NVIDIA GPUs have revolutionized advanced computing, by offloading certain processes from the CPU, to speed workloads compared to CPUs alone. However, for performance-hungry AI workloads, the network interface card (NIC) can become a bottleneck, loading up the processor with increasingly complex system and network tasks.
To counter this performance drain, NVIDIA is making the NIC smarter so that it can take over some of the processing functions that can slow down the CPU, for overall improvement in application performance, resource utilization and network speed.
These NVIDIA SmartNICs offload processing tasks from the server CPU to an integrated NVIDIA BlueField-3 data processing unit (DPU). This is a software-programmable, multi-core system-on-a-chip (SOC) based on the Arm architecture and NVIDIA ConnectX networking technology.
NVIDIA BlueField-3 is the first 400GbE/NDR InfiniBand DPU with line-rate processing of software-defined networking, storage and cybersecurity. BlueField-3 combines Arm processing cores, networking and programmability to deliver software-defined, hardware-acceleration for edge workloads like AI.
As the industry’s first 400GbE/NDR DPU, NVIDIA reports that BlueField-3 delivers unmatched networking performance. It features 10x the accelerated compute power of the previous generation, with 16x Arm A78 cores and 4x faster acceleration for cryptography. BlueField-3 is also the first DPU to support fifth-generation PCIe interconnects.
With a BlueField-3 DPU-enabled SmartNIC, compute, storage and networking can be more granularly software-defined and disaggregated to handle larger volumes of data faster and more efficiently.
