According to NVIDIA, its BlueField-2 DPU was able to achieve 41.5M IOPS during a storage benchmark test and claimed that it delivers “more than 4x IOPS than any other DPU.” NVIDIA made this claim in response to Fungible’s announcement last month that Fungible’s 10M IOPS storage demonstration, which was conducted with the San Diego Supercomputing Center, set new records for storage initiator performance on NVMe and TCP.

NVIDIA reported in its blog that “The BlueField-2 DPU delivered record-breaking performance using standard networking protocols and open-source software. It reached more than 5 million 4KB IOPS and from 7 million to over 20 million 512B IOPS for NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF), a common method of accessing storage media, with TCP networking, one of the primary internet protocols.”

NVIDIA blog describing the testing methodology and configuration

The article claims two HPE Proliant DL380 Gen 10 Plus servers were used, one as the application server (storage initiator) and one as the storage system (storage target). The servers had two Intel “Ice Lake” Xeon Platinum 8380 CPUs clocked at 2.3GHz, that provided 160 hyperthreaded cores per server, along with 512GB of DRAM, 220MB of L2/L3 cache (110MB per socket) and a PCIe Gen4 bus. 

Furthermore, they stated, “Three different storage initiators were benchmarked: SPDK, the standard kernel storage initiator, and the FIO plugin for SPDK. Workload generation and measurements were run with FIO and SPDK. I/O sizes were tested using 4KB and 512B, which are common medium and small storage I/O sizes, respectively.”

For secure, agile, hybrid-cloud data centres, the “Ice Lake” Xeon Platinum 8380 processors from Intel make the perfect foundation. They are specifically optimised for advanced analytics, artificial intelligence, and high-density infrastructure. These processors provide enhanced security and outstanding multi-socket performance for mission-critical, real-time analytics, machine learning, and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads. Through Xeon Platinum 8380 processor backed CPUs, we can achieve better memory, I/O, storage, and network performance, enabling us to acquire actionable insights from our increasingly data-driven world. 

BlueField Scales the Cloud

The elevator pitch for BlueField-2 is simple: unlock better software-defined networking, storage, and cybersecurity. Amidst the growth of AI applications, the company has acknowledged an industry-wide trend toward hybrid and full-cloud computing.

With the NVIDIA BlueField-2 DPU, organisations can build software-defined, hardware-accelerated, software-defined IT infrastructures from the cloud to the core by providing a secure and accelerated infrastructure. 

Scalability is the major advantage of the cloud. In contrast to physical facilities with space constraints, which require significant investments and land acquisition when expanding, external vendors have the surplus capacity to lend out. Through these servers, employees can access information virtually anywhere.

Fungible comparison

A pioneer in data-centric computing, Fungible provides hyper disaggregated compute and storage resources. A Fungible DPU acts as the data centre traffic cop by providing a high-speed, low-latency network linking the nodes in the data centre. Typical data centres use server CPUs as traffic cops, but they aren’t great at inter-node, data-centric communication.
In addition to highlighting DPU-based storage solutions, the NVIDIA and Fungible demos suggest an underlying battle among DPU providers. Based on this premise, DPUs – data processing units – may significantly reduce costs and improve host system performance by absorbing tasks that are typically handled by the CPU. Some of the most commonly-cited applications for DPUs are network management, storage management, and security management. So, a large prospect for the DPU market seems promising, according to market observers. NVIDIA, on the other hand, sees needing a significantly more powerful GPU along with Arm cores. In the coming three years’ time, the DPUs could be a major game-changer for large, composable storage infrastructure.