Fungible Inc. today announced at Hot Chips 2020, the Fungible Data Processing UnitTM (Fungible DPU™), a transformational technology that will power next-generation, high-performance, efficient and cost-optimized scale-out data centers.
“The Fungible DPU is purpose built to address two of the biggest challenges in scale-out data centers – inefficient data interchange between nodes and inefficient execution of data-centric computations,” said Pradeep Sindhu, CEO and Co-Founder of Fungible. “Data-centric computations are increasingly prevalent in data centers, with important examples being the computations performed in the network, storage, security and virtualization data-paths. Today, these computations are performed inefficiently by existing processor architectures. These inefficiencies cause overprovisioning and underutilization of resources, resulting in data centers that are significantly more expensive to build and operate. Eliminating these inefficiencies will also accelerate the proliferation of modern applications, such as AI and analytics.”
“The value proposition of scale-out infrastructure solutions appears straightforward, but in reality it is hard to implement it in a consistent and linearly scalable manner,” said Ashish Nadkarni, Group VP of Worldwide Infrastructure at IDC. “Current compute technologies fall short in the vendor’s ability to create an ultra-low latency and ultra-scalable solution for high bandwidth data movement. The industry needs a holistic and end-to solution that can disaggregate and compose infrastructure resources at cloud scale.”
The Fungible DPU is the “third socket” in data centers, complementing the CPU and GPU, and delivering unprecedented benefits not just in performance per unit power and space, but also strengthening reliability and security.
The Fungible DPU comprises two core innovations that are tightly interwoven:
A programmable data-path engine that executes data-centric computations at extremely high speeds, while providing flexibility comparable to general-purpose CPUs. The engine is programmed in C using industry standard tool chains and is designed to execute many data-path computations concurrently. This unique innovation enables the Fungible DPU to be fully customized to address the most stringent high-performance requirements visible today, while being future-proof against demanding new requirements that will surely appear over the next few years.
A new network engine that implements the endpoint of a high-performance TrueFabricTM that provides deterministic low latency, full cross-section bandwidth, congestion and error control, and high security at any scale (from 100s to 100,000s of nodes). The TrueFabric protocol is fully standards compliant and interoperable with TCP/IP over Ethernet, ensuring that the data center leaf-spine network can be built with standard Ethernet switches and standard electro-optics and fiber infrastructure.
“Business today operates in an always-on world of massive data that needs to be moved, stored and processed efficiently in cloud-native environments,” said Young Sohn, President and Chief Strategy Officer for Samsung Electronics and Chairman of the Board, HARMAN. “Yet, bottlenecks in disaggregated infrastructure force users to trade off compression and encryption with storage performance. To enable an architecture in which compute resources for microservices and container architecture can be easily scaled up or down as needed, Fungible has created a resilient fabric that securely connects compute and storage. The Fungible DPU, which is optimized for data-centric compute, enables line rate storage and security data services, unleashing the full capabilities and blazing fast performance of NVMe SSDs over the network.”
“As a long-time partner of some of the most demanding and high-scale cloud providers on the planet, networking has always been in Juniper Networks’ DNA,” said Rami Rahim, CEO of Juniper Networks. “We are excited to be working with Fungible to address large-scale network challenges in data centers and beyond. Fungible’s TrueFabric technology has demonstrated game-changing performance and latency characteristics that allow efficient disaggregation of all resources at data center scale. In addition, the Fungible DPU’s programmability has the potential to bring data-path agility to networks broadly.”
“The Fungible DPU addresses critical network bottlenecks in large scale data centers,” said Yi Qun Cai, VP of Cloud Networking Infrastructure, Alibaba. “Its TrueFabric technology enables disaggregation and pooling of all data center resources, delivering outstanding performance and latency characteristics at scale.”
Fungible also provides a full suite of software that enables the Fungible DPU and the products it powers to be used “out of the box”. This includes data-path stacks, host drivers and agents for x86, and a set of centralized cluster services that provides management, control and visibility of a large number of Fungible DPU-enabled products.
“We have executed the heavy lifting of providing foundational technology that removes the barrier of entry for building Fungible DPU-powered platforms, allowing our customers to accelerate development and in turn rapidly deliver compelling value to their end customers,” added Sindhu.
“In fact, we took great care to ensure our technology imposes no changes to applications or system software and our solutions fully enable our customers to leverage volume economics,” said Bertrand Serlet, Co-Founder of Fungible and previously VP of Software at Apple.
Availability
The Fungible DPU is available immediately at two performance points to select design partners for hyper-disaggregated deployments:
- Fungible F1 DPU – an 800Gbps processor designed specifically for high performance storage, analytics and security platforms.
- Fungible S1 DPU – a 200Gbps processor optimized for host-side use cases including bare metal virtualization, storage initiator, NFVi/VNF applications and distributed node security.
