The chipmaker said testing its BlueField-2 data processing units (DPUs) in servers could lead to significant savings in servers that don’t use specialized chips to offload tasks from the CPU.
The DPU or SmartNIC takes on certain workloads (packet routing, encryption, real-time data analysis), leaving the CPU free to process data. But Nvidia says they can also reduce power consumption.
The four tests involved running similar workloads on the server with and without the DPU, and Nvidia concluded that even though the DPU increased power consumption, the overall power consumption of the server decreased.
For example, one test found that when the DPU handles IPsec encryption, the server consumes 21% less power than when handling the task alone—525W with the DPU and 665W without the DPU.
“I can’t speak for others,” said Ami Badani, Nvidia’s vice president of marketing and developer ecosystem strategy. “But for the workloads we tested, if you run the same workload using DPUs in those servers, you end up needing fewer servers to run the same workload.
In addition to Nvidia, competitors Intel, AMD and Marvell also produce DPUs. (Nvidia acquired the BlueField-2 DPU series when it acquired Mellanox in 2019.
The tests were conducted in partnership with Ericsson, VMware and an unnamed North American wireless carrier.
Best results in testing show that offloading specific network tasks to the BlueField DPU can reduce power consumption by up to 34%, reducing power consumption by up to 247 watts per server. Nvidia says this could reduce the number of servers needed in some data centers.
Nvidia says how much dollar savings this translates into depends on electricity prices and the data center’s power usage effectiveness (PUE). PUE is the ratio between the total power consumed by the data center and the power used to power the network equipment within it.
However, it’s unlikely that data centers will make money by getting rid of servers, Badan said. “Realistically, most enterprises won’t say, ‘I’m just going to return five servers that I don’t need,’ most will repurpose those servers for other workloads,” she said.
Nonetheless, energy conservation can help organizations achieve their green/ESG initiatives.
But if they do choose to conserve servers, it can help businesses with environmental, social and governance initiatives, Badani said. “Saving cores ultimately means saving servers, so you don’t need the capacity you initially needed to store the same workload,” she said.