Product Overview
The NVIDIA BlueField SmartNIC is a two-port network adapter featuring the BlueField system-on-chip (SoC), which integrates the ConnectX®-5 network controller with an Arm multicore processor array, to deliver an innovative and high-performance programmable networking engine. Providing unmatched scalability and efficiency, NVIDIA BlueField SmartNIC is the ideal adapter to accelerate the most demanding workloads in data center, cloud, service provider and storage environments.
Powerful Smart Network Adapter
NVIDIA BlueField SmartNICs are offered in two form factors, half-height, half-length (HHHL) cards and full-height, half-length (FHHL) cards. NVIDIA SmartNICs come in different speeds, numbers of CPU cores and PCIe widths - from dual-port 25GbE PCIe Gen4.0 x8 to dual-port 100GbE PCIe Gen4.0 x16, supporting 4/8/16 Arm cores.
BlueField SmartNICs comprise of a BlueField SoC with a DDR4 DRAM memory subsystem and two Ethernet SFP28/QSFP28 ports. These powerful network adapters offer the flexibility to fully, or partially, implement and offload the data and control planes to accelerate a range of applications.
BlueField adapter enables a more efficient use of compute resources, now dedicated to run applications rather than focus on networking or security processing, therefore supporting the growing demand for bandwidth per host. This software-defined adapter ensures ultimate flexibility by adapting to future protocols and features through a simple software update. BlueField SmartNICs are half-length (HHHL) cards, dual-port 25GbE, PCIe Gen4.0 x8 supporting 4/8/16 Arm cores.
BlueField SmartNICs comprise of a BlueField SoC with a DDR4 DRAM memory subsystem and two Ethernet SFP28 ports. These powerful network adapters offer the flexibility to fully, or partially, implement and offload the data and control planes to accelerate a range of applications.
BlueField adapter enables a more efficient use of compute resources, now dedicated to run applications rather than focus on networking or security processing, therefore supporting the growing demand for bandwidth per host. This software-defined adapter ensures ultimate flexibility by adapting to future protocols and features through a simple software update.
BlueField-G Series 16 Cores SmartNICs
| Part Number | MBF1M332A-ASNAT | MBF1M332A-ASCAT | MBF1L516A-CSNAT | MBF1L516A-CSCAT |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Form Factor | Half-Height, Half-Length (HHHL) | Full-Height, Half-Length (FHHL) | ||
| Ethernet Data Rate | 1/10/25 GbE | 1/10/25/40/50/100 GbE | ||
| Network Connector Type | Dual-port SFP28 | Dual-port QSFP28 | ||
| PCI Express Connectors | PCIe Gen 3.0 (8GT/s) / Gen 4.0 (16GT/s) x8 lanes | PCIe Gen 3.0 (8GT/s) / Gen 4.0 (16GT/s) x16 lanes | ||
| On-board DDR4 Memorya | Single channel with 8 DDR4 8 bit + ECC (64bit + 8bit ECC) | |||
| BlueField IC OPN | MLX000348 | |||
| RoHS | RoHS Compliant | |||
| Crypto | Disabled | Enabled | Disabled | Enabled |
BlueField IC Cores | 16 Cores | |||
a. Please contact NVIDIA for 4GB or 8GB on-board DDR4 memory.
BlueField-G Series 16 Cores SmartNICs
| Part Number | MBF1M332A-ASNAT | MBF1M332A-ASCAT |
|---|---|---|
| Form Factor | Half-Height, Half-Length (HHHL) | |
| Ethernet Data Rate | 1/10/25 GbE | |
| Network Connector Type | Dual-port SFP28 | |
| PCI Express Connectors | PCIe Gen 3.0 (8GT/s) / Gen 4.0 (16GT/s) x8 lanes | |
| On-board DDR4 Memory(a) | Single channel with 8 DDR4 8 bit + ECC (64bit + 8bit ECC) | |
| BlueField IC OPN | MLX000348 | |
| RoHS | RoHS Compliant | |
| Crypto | Disabled | Enabled |
BlueField IC Cores | 16 Cores | |
a. Please contact NVIDIA for 4GB or 8GB on-board DDR4 memory.
BlueField-G Series 8 Cores SmartNICs
| Part Number | MBF1M332A-AECAT | MBF1M332A-AENAT | MBF1M322A-AENAT |
|---|---|---|---|
| Form Factor | Hull-Height, Half-Length (HHHL) | ||
| Ethernet Data Rate | 1/10/25 GbE | ||
| Network Connector Type | Dual-port SFP28 | ||
| PCI Express Connectors | PCIe Gen 3.0 (8GT/s) / Gen 4.0 (16GT/s) x8 lanes | ||
On-board DDR4 Memory(a) | Single channel with 8 DDR4 8 bit + ECC (64bit + 8bit ECC) | Single channel with 8 DDR4 8 bit + ECC (64bit + 8bit ECC) | |
| BlueField IC OPN | MLX000348 | ||
| RoHS | RoHS Compliant | ||
| Crypto | Enabled | Disabled | |
BlueField IC Cores | 8 Cores | ||
a. Please contact NVIDIA for 4GB or 8GB on-board DDR4 memory.
BlueField-G Series 8 Cores SmartNICs
| Part Number | MBF1M332A-AECAT | MBF1M332A-AENAT |
|---|---|---|
| Form Factor | Hull-Height, Half-Length (HHHL) | |
| Ethernet Data Rate | 1/10/25 GbE | |
| Network Connector Type | Dual-port SFP28 | |
| PCI Express Connectors | PCIe Gen 3.0 (8GT/s) / Gen 4.0 (16GT/s) x8 lanes | |
On-board DDR4 Memory(a) | Single channel with 8 DDR4 8 bit + ECC (64bit + 8bit ECC) | |
| BlueField IC OPN | MLX000348 | |
| RoHS | RoHS Compliant | |
| Crypto | Enabled | |
BlueField IC Cores | 8 Cores | |
a. Please contact NVIDIA for 4GB or 8GB on-board DDR4 memory.
BlueField-G Series 4 Cores SmartNICs
| Part Number | MBF1L332A-AFCAT | MBF1L332A-AFNAT |
|---|---|---|
| Form Factor | Half-Height, Half-Length (HHHL) | |
| Ethernet Data Rate | 1/10/25 GbE | |
| Network Connector Type | Dual-port SFP28 | |
| PCI Express Connectors | PCIe Gen 3.0 (8GT/s) / Gen 4.0 (16GT/s) x8 lanes | |
| On-board DDR4 Memory(a) | Single channel with 8 DDR4 8 bit + ECC (64bit + 8bit ECC) | |
| BlueField IC OPN | MLX000348 | |
| RoHS | RoHS Compliant | |
| Crypto | Enabled | Disabled |
BlueField IC Cores | 4 Cores | |
a. Please contact NVIDIA for 4GB or 8GB on-board DDR4 memory.
For more detailed information see Specifications.
Features and Benefits
This section describes hardware features and capabilities. Please refer to the relevant driver and/or firmware release notes for feature availability.
| Feature | Description |
| 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 | BlueField SmartNICs comply with the following IEEE 802.3 standards: • 25GbE / 10GbE / 1GbE |
| On-board Memory |
|
| 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. NVIDIA 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) | NVIDIA 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. |
| NVIDIA 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. NVIDIA 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.
NVIDIA 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. NVIDIA 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 | NVIDIA SmartNIC SR-IOV technology provides dedicated adapter resources and guaranteed isolation and protection for virtual machines (VM) within the server. |
| High-Performance Accelerations |
|
| 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 NVIDIA 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. NVIDIA SmartNIC uses high-speed DMA transfers to copy data between P2P devices resulting in more efficient system applications |
| Crypto | The NVIDIA 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 BlueField Software User Manual.
Connectivity
- Interoperable with 1/10/25/40/50/100 Gb/s Ethernet switches
- Interoperable with 1/10/25 Gb/s Ethernet switches
- Passive copper cable with ESD protection
- Powered connectors for optical and active cable support
