Nvidia BlueField is a line of

data processing unit A data processing unit (DPU) is a channel controller, a programmable specialized electronic circuit with hardware acceleration of data processing for data-centric computing. The data is transmitted to and from the component as multiplexed ...

s (DPUs) designed and produced by

Nvidia Nvidia CorporationOfficially written as NVIDIA and stylized in its logo as VIDIA with the lowercase "n" the same height as the uppercase "VIDIA"; formerly stylized as VIDIA with a large italicized lowercase "n" on products from the mid 1990s to ...

. Initially developed by

Mellanox Technologies Mellanox Technologies Ltd. ( he, מלאנוקס טכנולוגיות בע"מ) was an Israeli-American multinational supplier of computer networking products based on InfiniBand and Ethernet technology. Mellanox offered adapters, switches, softwa ...

, the BlueField IP was acquired by Nvidia in March 2019, when Nvidia acquired Mellanox Technologies for US$6.9 billion. The first Nvidia produced BlueField cards, named BlueField-2, were shipped for review shortly after their announcement at

VMworld VMworld is a global multi-cloud conference, hosted by VMware. It is the largest multi-cloud-specific event. It has been held in San Diego, California in 2004; Las Vegas, Nevada in 2005, 2008, 2011, 2016, 2017, and 2018; Los Angeles, California in 2 ...

2019, and were officially launched at GTC 2020. Also launched at GTC 2020 was the Nvidia BlueField-2X, an Nvidia BlueField card with an

Ampere The ampere (, ; symbol: A), often shortened to amp,SI supports only the use of symbols and deprecates the use of abbreviations for units. is the unit of electric current in the International System of Units (SI). One ampere is equal to elect ...

generation Graphic Processing Unit integrated onto the same card. BlueField-3 and BlueField-4 DPUs were first announced at GTC 2021, with the tentative launch dates for these cards being 2022 and 2024 respectively. Nvidia BlueField cards are targeted for use in datacenters and

high performance computing High-performance computing (HPC) uses supercomputers and computer clusters to solve advanced computation problems. Overview HPC integrates systems administration (including network and security knowledge) and parallel programming into a multid ...

, where latency and

bandwidth Bandwidth commonly refers to: * Bandwidth (signal processing) or ''analog bandwidth'', ''frequency bandwidth'', or ''radio bandwidth'', a measure of the width of a frequency range * Bandwidth (computing), the rate of data transfer, bit rate or thr ...

are important for efficient computation. BlueField cards differ from

network interface controller A network interface controller (NIC, also known as a network interface card, network adapter, LAN adapter or physical network interface, and by similar terms) is a computer hardware component that connects a computer to a computer network. Ear ...

s in their offloading of functions that would normally be reserved for the CPU, and the presence of

CPU core A central processing unit (CPU), also called a central processor, main processor or just processor, is the electronic circuitry that executes instructions comprising a computer program. The CPU performs basic arithmetic, logic, controlling, and ...

s (typically

ARM In human anatomy, the arm refers to the upper limb in common usage, although academically the term specifically means the upper arm between the glenohumeral joint (shoulder joint) and the elbow joint. The distal part of the upper limb between th ...

or MIPS based) and memory support (typically

DDR4 Double Data Rate 4 Synchronous Dynamic Random-Access Memory (DDR4 SDRAM) is a type of synchronous dynamic random-access memory with a high bandwidth ("double data rate") interface. Released to the market in 2014, it is a variant of dynamic rando ...

, though Bluefield-3's release brought support for more exotic memory types such as HBM and

DDR5 Double Data Rate 5 Synchronous Dynamic Random-Access Memory (DDR5 SDRAM) is a type of synchronous dynamic random-access memory. Compared to its predecessor DDR4 SDRAM Double Data Rate 4 Synchronous Dynamic Random-Access Memory (DDR4 SDRAM) ...

). BlueField cards also run an

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also in ...

completely independent from the host system: this is designed to reduce software overhead, as each DPU can function independently of one another and the head unit. This also means that Bluefield cards are capable of allowing remote management of systems that may not typically support it. Bluefield cards can also configure their

PCIe PCI Express (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express), officially abbreviated as PCIe or PCI-e, is a high-speed serial computer expansion bus standard, designed to replace the older PCI, PCI-X and AGP bus standards. It is the common mo ...

bus to function as a host, rather than a device, which lets Bluefield cards connect over a PCIe bridge to another card, such as a compute accelerator, to provide completely network-based, high bandwidth control of a GPU.

Models

H100 CNX & A100 EGX

The H100 CNX and the A100 EGX are NIC/GPU hybrid cards and, while visually similar to a Bluefield-X card, are completely distinct, do not have the Bluefield SOC integration. The cards are instead equipped with a generic ConnectX NIC

References

{{Reflist Nvidia hardware Networking hardware