https://lesitedefrancois.be/en/tags/smartnic/Recent content in Smartnic on Le Site de FrançoisHugo -- gohugo.ioen© 2026 Françoishttps://lesitedefrancois.be/en/ai/dpu/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://lesitedefrancois.be/en/ai/dpu/<p>A <strong>DPU (Data Processing Unit)</strong>—also marketed as an infrastructure processing unit or <strong>SmartNIC</strong>—is a programmable accelerator placed on the network path between servers and the fabric. Its objective is to <strong>offload infrastructure work</strong> 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 <strong>zero-trust</strong> 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.</p>