What is a DPU and What is SmartNIC ?What is the difference between DPU and SmartNIC?

 Committed to the principles of open-source collaboration, Asterfusion is proud to share our DPU -based SmartNIC information and codes with the public soon. We encourage professionals across industries and manufacturers within our ecosystem to connect with us, exploring the innovative potential of DPU in a variety of applications!

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What is a DPU and what does it do?

What is SmartNIC

What is the difference between DPU and SmartNIC?

It’s evident that the widespread implementation of different smart network cards within server clusters can significantly decrease data center construction and operational costs. Notwithstanding, when examining solely from the perspective of the network card, there’s still ample room for optimization within this solution.

Such as:

• Incomplete OVS offloading: The SmartNIC is only responsible for offloading the OVS forwarding plane, but the control plane still needs to be processed by the host CPU; and interfaces and related protocols need to be defined for offloaded services, which is complicated to implement.
• It is difficult to offload the virtual network function to the SmartNIC, and many network functions (such as vLB, vNAT, etc.) are still running on the server
• Unable to achieve storage acceleration and mount remote storage, resulting in server performance bottlenecks
• Some network cards without an independent CPU do not have programming capabilities at all, or chip programming is difficult and its ecologically support is missing, and the development threshold is high, making it difficult to meet diverse and changing cloud business needs…

Asterfusion DPU-Based Open Architecture ARM SOC SmartNIC – Helium Series

Server in Server,  Asterfusion DPU based SmartNICs Take Offload A Step Further

The Helium SmartNIC uses a multi-core ARM architecture processor and integrates various hardware acceleration co-processors. The performance is high enough to run various network function virtualization functions directly on the network card, releasing valuable server CPU ‘s resources.

Provides Standard Linux Kernel + Container Architecture, DPDK/VPP Development Kit

The Helium DPU network card boasts a multi-core ARM architecture processor and incorporates various hardware acceleration co-processors. This high-performance setup allows it to run multiple network function virtualization tasks directly on the card, freeing up essential server resources.

Committed to the principles of open source and transparency, Asterfusion equips its powerful hardware with an accessible software development environment, complete with a standard Linux kernel, container architecture, and additional DPDK/VPP development kits. This enables customers to create upper-layer applications without worrying about underlying support frameworks. Further, DPDK applications and other programs initially running on x86 can be easily ported to Helium DPU smart network cards through simple compilation.

Supports Storage Acceleration& Remote Cloud Disk Mounting, Catering To Server Storage Flexible Expansion.

Employs SPDK software acceleration and NVMe-oF (TCP) offload to reduce storage I/O paths, enhancing storage read and write performance significantly.

Significantly Reduce Data Center’s Overall Construction & Operation Costs

To illustrate the benefits, let’s consider a customer scenario.

By implementing Helium smart network cards while maintaining the total number of access users, the construction plan significantly outperforms a pure 2U server approach in terms of rack space usage, overall power consumption, and cost savings. Specifically, rack space is reduced by over 2/3, total power consumption is cut in half, and construction costs are trimmed by 12,000 USD. Additionally, the average number of users connected per rack unit increases more than threefold.

https://cloudswit.ch/blogs/asterfusion-high-performance-dpu-based-smartnic-announced-open-source/