Every data center in the world will deploy data processing units (DPU) to isolate the application layer from the control plane within five years, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang claimed Tuesday during a press conference.

“Every single data center, enterprise, or cloud, the control plane and the application plane will be isolated. I promise you that,” he said.

The reason comes down to security and performance overheads. “The application is where the intruder is and you don’t want the intruder in the control room,” he said. “You want the two to be isolated.”

This is exactly what Nvidia’s BlueField DPU is designed to do. The smartNICS, BlueField-2 and BlueField-3, acquired with Nvidia's $6.9 billion purchase of Mellanox in 2019, are designed to offload SDN, security, and storage works, freeing up the CPU cycles in the process.

About a third of data center resources today are consumed by software emulating networking, storage, and security gear, Huang explained.

“Once data centers start trying to inspect every single packet of east-west traffic, the CPUs running emulated network functions are going to be completely overwhelmed,” he said. “The amount of computation that we’re offloading to an infrastructure computing platform is really quite significant.”

DPUs are optimized for these kinds of workloads, with Nvidia’s BlueField-3 DPU capable of offloading and accelerating the equivalent of 300 x86-cores worth of infrastructure workloads, the company claims.

This level of performance is the only thing that’s going to enable data centers to bring zero trust to data center infrastructure, according to Huang. The data center of the future is at every edge, whether that be the telco edge, a 5G base station or cell tower, the branch or factory, and even automobiles, he added.

“Every cell tower is going to be a data center and run applications. They’ll run artificial intelligence (AI) applications. These AI applications could be hosting an application for a client or it could be doing AI processing to optimize radio beams,” he said. “Every single car, truck, shuttle will be a data center.”

Extending zero-trust philosophies at the infrastructure level is going to be critical for ensuring the security of workloads, he said. “They’ll be isolated and secured, so you need something like BlueField.”

“How could you have a several billion-dollar factory with robots moving around… and not have it be completely tamper proof,” Huang said. “It’s absolutely out of question and so that factory is going to be built like a secure data center. And again, we’ll be there.”

Nvidia is far from the only vendor pursuing DPUs or smartNICs. Companies like Fungible and Intel are also working on products designed to offload domain-specific workloads from the CPU.

However, the hardware is no longer the barrier, according to Huang. “What's the obstacle? Software. We’ve got to port the software,” he said.

Widespread adoption of DPUs in the data center, according to Huang, will be enabled by three software platforms: VMware vSphere, Red Hat, and the chipmaker’s own data center infrastructure on a chip architecture (DOCA) 1.0 software development kit (SDK).

About 80% of enterprises run their data centers using VMware’s vSphere platform, Huang said. Nvidia and Intel joined forces with VMware to address this challenge through Project Monterey. The project's goal is to enable VMware’s vSphere platform to leverage the capabilities of either chipmaker’s smartNICs.

Nvidia now claims its BlueField-3 DPU, announced this week, can run the entire VMware ESXi virtualization stack, thereby opening the entire CPU to run virtualized workloads.

Meanwhile for edge deployments — telecom edge in particular — Huang said Red Hat’s OpenShift platform remains the platform of choice. And finally, for cloud providers running “bespoke software,” Nvidia developed the DOCA SDK to enable customers to write software specifically for the chipmaker’s BlueField DPUs.

“Using DOCA, everything that runs on BlueField-2 runs on BlueField-3 runs on BlueField-4,” Huang said. “Now the software developers know their work will be leveraged across a very large footprint and that … their investment will be protected for decades to come."