DPU & DOCA

CPU, GPU, all of the computer technology have a little understanding of the friend should be not strange, but have you heard of DPU?

DPU (Data Processing Unit) is developing rapidly and becoming the third computing Unit of data-centered accelerated computing model: CPU for general computing, GPU for accelerated computing, and DPU for Data Processing. CPU, GPU, and DPU are becoming the three pillars of the future data center.

Instead of throwing everything to the CPU in the past, DPU aims to focus on data processing to achieve higher speed and higher security. Its application scenarios mainly include network, storage, and security.

For example, in an online game, the CPU only deals with the gameplay logic of the game, and the graphics rendering is handled by the GPU, while the tasks of network transmission, encryption, authentication and data storage are handled by the DPU, which can provide higher performance and better user experience.

But without software, chips are just expensive sand.

Therefore, in order to accelerate the deployment of Data centers and support developers to develop software on DPU, NVIDIA has created a software development suite — Data Center Infrastructure on a Chip Architecture (DOCA) for DPU.

Developers can quickly create a range of applications and services for networking, storage, security, management, and AI/HPC on NVIDIA BlueField DPU using industry standard apis. DOCA SDK supports a variety of operating systems, including drivers, libraries, sample codes and corresponding documents, greatly simplifying the development process.

DOCA ecological

Today’s computer industry is no longer an era in which one company can support a field. Openness, compatibility, cooperation and win-win are the right ways to make the cake bigger. Therefore, DOCA is positioned not only as a chip software development suite, but as a whole ecosystem.

NVIDIA is working with leading global platform vendors and partners such as Juniper, Excelero, VMWare, Palo Alto and others to integrate and extend solutions based on NVIDIA BlueField DPU and NVIDIA DOCA software architecture. Developers have access to a wealth of resources to develop applications in scenarios such as zero-trust security, Morpheus ARTIFICIAL intelligence security, edge network services platform, and high-speed distributed storage using NVIDIA DOCA 1.2.

For a technological ecosystem, the most important “resource” is people. Only the continuous participation of many developers can make a technology ecosystem sustainable.

As a result, NVIDIA launched the NVIDIA DOCA China Developer Community in June 2021. To date, nearly 1,000 developers have signed up for The DOCA Developer Early Access Program, accounting for nearly half of the global sign-ups, and it continues to grow.

On January 13, NVIDIA DOCA China developer Community Development webinar successfully concluded. The core team of NVIDIA DOCA Chinese developer community and representatives of NVIDIA’s core partners attended the conference and discussed the business application of NVIDIA BlueField DPU products and NVIDIA DOCA software development architecture in cloud, data center and edge application scenarios. And in-depth focus on DOCA developers in the consumer Internet, network security and higher education and other key industries development resources and capacity improvement needs, dedicated to the design of DOCA Chinese developer community development planning.

DPU & DOCA Center of Excellence

Due to the importance of DPU and DOCA, as well as their huge application potential among Chinese developers, NVIDIA does its best to provide resources and support to Chinese developers. Faced with the problem of DOCA development environment without DPU in China, NVIDIA chose litai (Shanghai) Information Technology Co., Ltd. and Shanghai Xinhong Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd. to set up the first NVIDIA authorized partner DPU & DOCA Center of Excellence to provide developers with local DOCA development software and hardware environment.

As core partners of NVIDIA, the two companies have long and deep knowledge of NVIDIA’s product technologies and solutions, especially experience in deep learning applications in the cloud, data center and edge, and are key partners in NVIDIA Deep Learning Training Center (DLI) and partner training

The two partners are the first members of the DPU & DOCA Center of Excellence, NVIDIA’s licensed partner, to launch the DPU & DOCA Center of Excellence. During the trial operation period, each partner will independently build and operate the VIRTUAL DEVELOPMENT platform of DPU & DOCA based on NVIDIA Bluefield-2 DPU, establish a third-party DPU development environment, and provide an online practice development environment for DOCA Chinese developers. And build DPU and DOCA ecosystem together with NVIDIA.

Grow up together

The DOCA developer community provides a wealth of learning resources and networking opportunities for developers working on DPU development or planning to get involved in the field.

Since the second half of 2021, NVIDIA has successfully held three online training camps for DOCA developers, introducing the application and future technology evolution of NVIDIA BlueField DPU and DOCA in modern data centers. The NVIDIA DOCA suite of software stacks, development environments, development resources, development guides, and application cases has attracted more than 3,500 developers to participate and interact. During the latest boot camp, NVIDIA’s new DOCA 1.2 software development suite services and new applications such as zero-trust security and cloud-native supercomputing solutions were released at GTC Fall 2021, attracting a lot of attention. At the same time, NVIDIA’s technical information and success stories about NVIDIA BlueField DPU and NVIDIA DOCA software development suite have been well received by developers and industry insiders on social media and knowledge communities.

In 2022, NVIDIA will continue to offer a rich DOCA developer development program, including the DOCA Hackathon competition. Following DOCA Developer hackathon competitions held in Europe and North America, NVIDIA is expected to host the first Chinese DOCA Developer Hackathon in spring in q2 2022. Prior to the contest, NVIDIA will host an online training camp for DOCA developers to introduce participants to BlueField DPU and DOCA programming skills.

NVIDIA will invite teams of developers from partners, customers, and academia to learn, collaborate, and accelerate their software design under the guidance of NVIDIA expert mentors, Choose to develop innovative and breakthrough software projects based on NVIDIA BlueField DPU and NVIDIA DOCA 1.2 in high-performance networking, virtualization, network security, distributed storage, accelerated artificial intelligence, edge computing and video streaming. Lead the DOCA China developer community to create revolutionary data center infrastructure applications and services. Finally, NVIDIA will award outstanding innovative teams through judging.

Hackathons are very efficient for developers to grow by learning together, working on projects together, and sharing experiences together. In addition, the DOCA Developer community and Center of Excellence will provide additional resources in 2022, such as signing up for the NVIDIA DOCA Developer Early Access Program, DOCA Software Development Suite documentation, DPU user guidance documentation and free online training to support developers at all stages.

It is believed that the implementation of DOCA developer program can effectively promote the development of DOCA Chinese developer community, promote talent cultivation and ability improvement of DOCA developers, and enable BlueField DPU and DOCA software development suite solutions to have better performance advantages and shorter time to market. Create more value for customers and partners.