Introduction to Data Processing Units (DPUs)

Overview

Data Processing Units (DPUs) are programmable processors designed to offload and accelerate infrastructure workloads and data processing. This workshop introduces the NVIDIA BlueField-3 DPU and examines its programming models including the DOCA SDK, P4, and DPDK. It also demonstrates cybersecurity applications offloaded to the DPU.

Audience

The target audience for this tutorial includes Information Technology (IT) professionals and practitioners, researchers, and application developers. The tutorial can also be useful for instructors interested in teaching DPU-related technologies in the classrooms.

Tutorial Goals

The workshop aims to equip participants with both theoretical knowledge and practical skills related to packet processing in high-speed networks. By the end of this workshop, attendees will:

• Understand the programming models of DPUs
• Implement DPDK pipelines using the P4 language.
• Describe the elements of the Portable NIC Architecture (PNA), define and parse protocol headers and header fields in P4, define match-action tables and populate them at runtime.
• Develop DPDK-based defense solutions.
• Accelerate packet processing using the Receive Side Scaling (RSS), which distributes packets across multiple CPU cores.