Tutorial on DPU at Micro 2023

Introduction

Modern datacenters are suffering from “datacenter tax” in supporting high-performance feature-rich devices such as GPU, SSD, NPU, and NIC. This tax takes a huge amount of CPU bandwidth, and thus modern datacenters have kept increasing the number of servers to provide sufficient CPU bandwidth to numerous devices. But, the unnecessarily scaled-out servers have to limit the number of the devices deployable per server and the performance of the devices to reduce the cost.

To alleviate the CPU overhead, Data Processing Unit (DPU) and its equivalents (i.e., IPU, SmartNIC, xPU) have been proposed and actively adopted by the industry. DPU or its equivalents are independent devices deployed per server (1) to offload the device-critical system software stack from host CPU to them, and (2) to accelerate the offloaded system software stack by exploiting their custom-designed architectures.

In this tutorial, we will first introduce modern DPU solutions with their opportunities and challenges. Next, we will introduce Alice DPU, an FPGA-based DPU platform available from MangoBoost (https://mangoboost.io/), and illustrate how our DPU solutions can boost the performance of the real-world datacenter applications by minimizing the datacenter tax. Finally, we will discuss research directions on how computer architects can take advantage of DPU for their own research purposes.