It has been several years since Canonical committed to implementing support for NVIDIA smart NICs in our products. Among them, Canonical’s metal-as-a-service (MAAS) enables the management and control of smart NICs on top of bare-metal servers. NVIDIA BlueField smart NICs are very high data rate network interface cards providing advanced software-defined data centre infrastructure services. They include high performance specialised network ASICs (application-specific integrated circuits) and powerful general purpose CPUs and RAM. These cards provide network function acceleration, hardware offloading and isolation that enable innovative network, security and storage use cases.
From integrating kernel drivers to deploying and managing the life-cycle of the software running on the cards themselves, Canonical products treat DPUs as first class citizens. Our operating system and infrastructure software enable all the features and benefits of these cards. Indeed, these programmable…
