| PCI Express (PCIe) | Uses PCIe Gen 3.0 (8GT/s) and Gen 4.0 (16GT/s) through an x8 edge connector. Gen 1.1 and 2.0 compatible. |
| Up to 25 Gigabit Ethernet |
Mellanox adapters comply with the following IEEE 802.3 standards: • 25GbE / 10GbE / 1GbE |
| On-board Memory |
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| BlueField SoC | The BlueField SoC integrates four, eight or sixteen 64-bit Armv8 A72 cores interconnected by a coherent mesh network, one DRAM controller, a dual port RDMA intelligent Ethernet adapter supporting up to 100Gb/s, an embedded PCIe switch with endpoint and root complex functionality, and up to 8 lanes of PCIe Gen 3.0/4.0. |
| Overlay Networks | In order to better scale their networks, data center operators often create overlay networks that carry traffic from individual virtual machines over logical tunnels in encapsulated formats such as NVGRE and VXLAN. While this solves network scalability issues, it hides the TCP packet from the hardware offloading engines, placing higher loads on the host CPU. Mellanox SmartNIC effectively addresses this by providing advanced NVGRE and VXLAN hardware offloading engines that encapsulate and de-capsulate the overlay protocol.otocol. |
| RDMA and RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) | Mellanox SmartNIC, utilizing IBTA RDMA (Remote Data Memory Access) and RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet) technology, delivers low-latency and high-performance over Ethernet networks. Leveraging data center bridging (DCB) capabilities as well as advanced congestion control hardware mechanisms, RoCE provides efficient low-latency RDMA services over Layer 2 and Layer 3 networks. |
| Mellanox PeerDirect™ | PeerDirect™ communication provides high-efficiency RDMA access by eliminating unnecessary internal data copies between components on the PCIe bus (for example, from GPU to CPU), and therefore significantly reduces application run time. Mellanox SmartNIC advanced acceleration technology enables higher cluster efficiency and scalability to tens of thousands of nodes. |
| Quality of Service (QoS) | Support for port-based Quality of Service enabling various application requirements for latency and SLA. |
| Storage Acceleration |
A consolidated compute and storage network achieves significant cost-performance advantages over multi-fabric networks. Standard block and file access protocols can leverage RDMA for high-performance storage access.
Mellanox BlueField SmartNIC may operate as a co-processor offloading specific storage tasks from the host, isolating part of the storage media from the host, or enabling abstraction of software-defined storage logic |
| NVMe-oF | Nonvolatile Memory Express (NVMe) over Fabrics is a protocol for communicating block storage IO requests over RDMA to transfer data between a host computer and a target solid-state storage device or system over a network. Mellanox BlueField SmartNIC may operate as a co-processor offloading specific storage tasks from the host using its powerful NVMe over Fabrics Offload accelerator. |
| SR-IOV |
Mellanox SmartNIC SR-IOV technology provides dedicated adapter resources and guaranteed isolation and protection for virtual machines (VM) within the server. |
| High-Performance Accelerations |
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| GPU Direct |
The latest advancement in GPU-GPU communications is GPUDirect RDMA. This new technology provides a direct P2P (Peer-to-Peer) data path between the GPU Memory directly to/from the Mellanox HCA devices. This provides a significant decrease in GPU-GPU communication latency and completely offloads the CPU, removing it from all GPU-GPU communications across the network. Mellanox SmartNIC uses high-speed DMA transfers to copy data between P2P devices resulting in more efficient system applications |
| Crypto |
The Mellanox BlueField SmartNIC crypto enabled versions includes a BlueField IC which supports accelerated cryptographic operations. In addition to specialized instructions for bulk cryptographic processing in the Arm cores, an offload hardware engine accelerates public-key cryptography and random number generation are enabled. |
| Security Accelerators |
A consolidated compute and network solution based on SmartNIC achieves significant advantages over a centralized security server solution. Standard encryption protocols and security applications can leverage BlueField compute capabilities and network offloads for security application solutions such as Layer4 Statefull Firewall. |
Operating Systems/Distributions
The SmartNIC is shipped with Linux based Operating System burned on it which includes all needed drivers. For more information, please refer to the Mellanox BlueField Software User Manual.
Connectivity
- Interoperable with 1/10/25 Gb/s Ethernet switches
- Passive copper cable with ESD protection
- Powered connectors for optical and active cable support
