Intel - Is it an IPU or a DPU or what?

Intel has developed and sold classic Ethernet Network Interface Cards (NICs) for a long time, but many might not be as familiar with their product offerings in the SmartNIC and more advanced NIC categories. Intel breaks down their product offering as follows:

Intel presented on the work they are doing around their Infrastructure Process Unit (IPU), which they refer to as an "Improved DPU" or Data Processing Unit, which fits in the general bucket of "SmartNIC" and is developed by the Intel NEX Cloud Connectivity Group. This post focuses on that, since that is what they presented at #NFD35. I must admit, I am interested in hearing more about their AI Optimized solutions as I am sure they are being leveraged by some very large organizations for interesting workloads, perhaps a future NFD?

There were two features in the IPU that are something infrastructure engineers should know about. Specifically, the capability to build out reliable transport between two hosts who both have an Intel IPUs. The Ethernet fabric no longer needs to run special queuing and management to deal with congestion and microburst issues but instead, the IPU running Falcon, and leveraging programable congestion control, deals with it. Effectively, Falcon is the method for reliable transport over an existing lossy fabric which brings a lot of options to companies who may not want to build out a dedicated fabric for running storage or AI workloads.

In a shared fabric environment, it can be difficult to structure and provision all the access ports with the right queuing and policies. Given that difficultly, it might make sense, for smaller networks and diverse compute environments, to simple purchase the more advanced IPU's for the servers that require them and have the IPU deal with the lossy fabric issues.

The other feature was demonstrating the use of the IPU for general compute capabilities and also AI inference, and the markets that could potentially use the solution. They are definitely targeting a wide audience of infrastructure engineers who might need to run services and workloads but might not have the capacity, budget, or fabric design to support what they are trying to do. Intel sees the following areas as potential good use cases for their IPU.

 

You can watch the overview presentation from Thomas Scheibe w/ Intel at:

If you want more information about their Reliable Transport over Lossy Fabrics, which is called Falcon, then check out:

Intel also provided some actual demos and you can watch those at:

What is always a little interesting about Intel and their solutions, is that typically, you and I aren't buying directly from Intel. You are normally purchasing their products through a distributor or hardware supplier like HPE, or Dell, or SuperMicro. But Intel still wants infrastructure engineers to know what their products are capable of, so when you are building out the next server, you are picking the right SmartNIC for your specific needs. So it makes sense they are out providing this information directly to the public, or NFD events in this case, so you can pick and choose the right solution for your Data Center and Enterprise server networking needs.

- Ed

In a spirit of fairness (and also because it is legally required by the FTC), I am posting this Disclosure Statement. It is intended to alert readers to funding or gifts that might influence my writing. My participation in Network Field Day, a Tech Field Day event, was voluntary and I was invited to participate. Tech Field Day events are hosted by Gestalt IT (part of The Futurum Group) and my hotel, transportation, food and beverage was/is paid for by Gestalt IT for the duration of the event. In addition, small swag gifts or donations were/are provided by some of the sponsors of the event to delegates (I don't accept gifts but I do ask the sponsors to donate to causes that support Mental Health). It should be noted that there was/is no requirement to produce content about the sponsors and any content produced does not require review or editing by Gestalt IT or the sponsors of the event. So all the spelling mistakes, technical missteps, incorrect opinions, and grammar errors are my own.

Network Field Day 35

Network Field Day 35 (#NFD35) is happening July 10-11, 2024 and I am fortunate enough to be a delegate for the event. You can check out the full event schedule at the NFD35 website. The sponsors list has been growing so checking the site is the best until the event starts. I recommend watching live if you can and I believe LinkedIn is likely the best place to catch stuff.

So far the sponsor line up is:

• Arrcus
• cPacket
• Hedgehog
• Intel
• Selector

I will be attending in person, and I will be doing my best to take notes and ask interesting questions. Obviously, there is no way we can cover all the questions that those who are watching remote might have, but hit us up on X/Twitter using #NFD35 or via the Tech Field Day slack channel or even via LinkedIn and we will all do our best to try and bring up the point.

So, there you go, let's get ready to have some serious fun with NFD35 as the delegate line up is pretty impressive! If you are at all into networking then I encourage you to follow along live for the events on the Tech Field Day website or via LinkedIn. If you are interested in being a delegate, you can check out the website, they have all the details up there.

- Ed


In a spirit of fairness (and also because it is legally required by the FTC), I am posting this Disclosure Statement. It is intended to alert readers to funding or gifts that might influence my writing. My participation in Tech Field Day events was voluntary and I was invited to participate. Tech Field Day is hosted by Gestalt IT (part of The Futurum Group) and my hotel, transportation, food and beverage was/is paid for by Gestalt IT for the duration of the event. In addition, small swag gifts or donations were/are provided by some of the sponsors of the event to delegates (I don't accept gifts but I do ask the sponsors to donate to causes that support Mental Health). It should be noted that there was/is no requirement to produce content about the sponsors and any content produced does not require review or editing by Gestalt IT or the sponsors of the event. So all the spelling mistakes, technical missteps, incorrect opinions, and grammar errors are my own.

Intel Silicon Photonics - the way forward

Intel presented at Networking Field Day on May 13, 2021 - I really recommend you check out the presentation on Silicon Photonics, you will likely learn something new if you are not staying super current on optical hardware. As a networking engineer, optics are a big part of what you deal with in designing and building networks. More importantly, it is likely the most expensive device per unit cost you will be buying for a regular data center deployment, or any deployment for that matter. So having an understanding of what is happening is critical to helping your company invest correctly and likely save some money in the process.

Some industry trends over the last 5-10 years are starting to dramatically change the landscape. If you are still doing MMF in your DC and still installing that as your primary fiber plant, it might be time to reconsider. Most DC builds are doing SMF for a wide variety of reasons. For today's 10/25/40/50/100/400G connections, SMF is likely more cost effective and gives you more options on how to build out your DC cable runs. To back this up, let's look at some data.

One of the interesting parts of what Intel shared was some trends on where Ethernet transceivers are going. Basically, 100G and 400G SMF is where things are heading and you need to plan and invest accordingly. And 400G SMF transceivers will start breaking away by 2023. This matches what I am seeing in the data center deployments I am involved with for customers. But it is nice to see industry data matching what you are seeing in the field.

So how is Intel innovating in the traditional transceiver business? They have found a way to produce a much more predictable, reliable and cost effective transceiver. I learned a lot from this presentation, and the surprise was how traditional transceivers are actually built. I had no idea some much manual and potential error prone process went into these devices. The traditional transceivers were more like custom kit cars versus modern car manufacturing. All the pieces have to fit and work and be precision placed and aligned. If any of that fails or doesn't work the transceiver fails. Compare that to an integrated optic which has everything designed and built as one discrete unit in silicon, it just makes so much sense that this is a better design and model for optics going forward. Check out the difference:

Then there is the next leap to changing how we think about optical completely. The move to co-packaged optics and changing from a pluggable format to just having the right optical interface on the device. It is a bit of a throw back to the days when an Ethernet interface or a Serialized interface was how you ordered your router and what was on that router was what you got. Modular interfaces wasn't a thing until later when multiple Ethernet quantity and multiple serial interface types were needed and making them modular was more cost effective. So, the density and cooling requirements for these devices will be much better than sticking with a pluggable design.

Intel has built a co-packaged optics Ethernet Switch to demonstrate what this could look like. Don't be surprised if this starts to become more common, especially when the higher density 100G/400G switches become the standard.

I had no idea how much innovation was happening in this space. Clearly Intel's investment in Silicon Photonics is going to change how networks are built, how much they cost and how fiber plant will be built today and the future. Check out the presentation and let me know what you think!

- Ed

In a spirit of fairness (and also because it is legally required by the FTC), I am posting this Disclosure Statement. It is intended to alert readers to funding or gifts that might influence my writing. My participation in Tech Field Day events was voluntary and I was invited to participate in NFD25. Tech Field Day is hosted by Gestalt IT and my hotel, transportation, food and beverage was/is paid for by Gestalt IT for the duration of the event, if travel was involved. In addition, small swag gifts or donations were/are provided by some of the sponsors of the event to delegates. It should be noted that there was/is no requirement to produce content about the sponsors and any content produced does not require review or editing by Gestalt IT or the sponsors of the event.