Video: Mellanox Rolls Out SmartNICs

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

In this video, Mellanox CTO Michael Kagan talks about the next step for SmartNICs and the company’s newly released ConnectX-6 Dx product driven by its own silicon.

Earlier this week, Mellanox introduced ConnectX-6 Dx and BlueField-2 – next-generation cloud SmartNICs and I/O Processing Unit (IPU) solutions, delivering unprecedented data center security, performance and efficiency at massive scale, for any workload. Continuing Mellanox’s innovation in high-performance cloud fabrics, ConnectX-6 Dx and BlueField-2 make the impossible possible by introducing cutting-edge hardware acceleration engines and best-in-class software programmability to mission-critical applications. They deliver new levels of security and efficiency with the highest return on investment (ROI) for hyperscale, enterprise, and telco environments.

We are excited to introduce the ConnectX-6 Dx and BlueField-2 architectures, providing groundbreaking acceleration engines for next-generation cloud data centers,” said Yael Shenhav, vice president, Ethernet NIC and SoC at Mellanox. “Built on the success of our award-winning ConnectX and BlueField product families, ConnectX-6 Dx and BlueField-2 set new records in high-performance networking, allowing our customers and partners to build highly secure and efficient compute and storage infrastructures to increase productivity and reduce total cost of ownership.”

ConnectX-6 Dx SmartNICs provide up to two ports of 25, 50 or 100Gb/s, or a single port of 200Gb/s, Ethernet connectivity powered by 50Gb/s PAM4 SerDes technology and PCIe 4.0 host connectivity. The ConnectX-6 Dx innovative hardware offload engines include IPsec and inline TLS data-in-motion cryptography, advanced network virtualization, RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE), and NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) storage accelerations.

The BlueField-2 IPU integrates all the advanced capabilities of ConnectX-6 Dx with an array of powerful Arm processor cores, high performance memory interfaces, and flexible processing capabilities in a single System-on-Chip (SoC), supporting both Ethernet and InfiniBand connectivity up to 200Gb/s. BlueField-2-based embedded controllers are ideal for building highly efficient and cost-effective flash storage, security, IoT and edge computing platforms. BlueField-2 SmartNICs can act as a coprocessor that puts a computer in front of the computer to transform bare-metal and virtualized environments using advanced software-defined networking, NVMe SNAP storage disaggregation, and enhanced security capabilities. Furthermore, BlueField-2 delivers unmatched performance and efficiency for AI workloads in the cloud or at the network edge.

Our partnership with Mellanox in high-performance computing and AI is a key pillar of the Lenovo ‘From Exascale to Everyscale’ strategy to make the technologies of Exascale computing accessible to customers of all sizes,” said Scott Tease, executive director of High-Performance Computing and Artificial Intelligence, Lenovo Data Center Group. “The new Mellanox portfolios of SmartNICs and IPUs will help to make ‘Exascale to Everyscale’ a reality, delivering secure, efficient, high-speed connectivity for the data centric future.”

Sign up for our insideHPC Newsletter