DPU (Data Processing Unit)
A DPU (Data Processing Unit)—also marketed as an infrastructure processing unit or SmartNIC—is a programmable accelerator placed on the network path between servers and the fabric. Its objective is to offload infrastructure work that would otherwise consume host CPU cycles and pollute caches: virtual switching (OVS), overlay encapsulation (VXLAN/Geneve), storage initiation (NVMe-oF), firewalling, TLS termination, telemetry export, and increasingly zero-trust policy enforcement. In AI clusters, DPUs help preserve GPU servers for model compute by moving east-west networking, storage, and security functions to the NIC. A DPU is not a replacement for a training GPU; it complements it by making the surrounding data-center network and storage stack more efficient and isolatable.