NVIDIA DOCA and BlueField DPU

NVIDIA DOCA (Data Center Infrastructure on a Chip Architecture) is the software framework for NVIDIA BlueField DPUs and ConnectX SmartNICs.

A DPU (Data Processing Unit) contains:

• High-speed network interface (up to 400 Gb/s Ethernet or InfiniBand)
• ARM cores for running infrastructure services
• Hardware accelerators (cryptography, compression, regex)
• Local DRAM for the ARM subsystem

The DPU has two isolated domains:

• Host domain — Interacts with the x86 CPU server
• DPU-Arm domain — Runs infrastructure services independently, isolated from tenant workloads

DOCA enables:

• Network, security, and storage offloading from the CPU
• Acceleration of data center workloads
• Zero-trust security architecture
• Isolation of infrastructure services from application workloads