inference/research
verifiedhigh · 0.90updated 2026-10-04

NVIDIA BlueField-3 DPU

50 GB/s

Fields

id
interconnect/nic-bluefield3-dpu
Kind
ethernet
Version
BlueField-3, NDR 400Gb/s or NDR200 200Gb/s or HDR100 100Gb/s
Bandwidth (GB/s, per link, unidirectional)
50
Bandwidth basis
PER LANE, PER DIRECTION. NDR 400Gb/s = 50 GB/s per direction per port. BlueField-3 supports NDR 400Gb/s, NDR200 200Gb/s, or HDR100 100Gb/s depending on model.
Link count
2
Topology
Standard Ethernet or InfiniBand switched fabric. BlueField-3 can operate in either Ethernet or InfiniBand mode.
Scale-up
no
Scale-out
yes
Switching
ASAP2 (Accelerated Switch and Packet Processing) for SDN/VNF acceleration. OVS acceleration, overlay network acceleration (VXLAN, GENEVE, NVGRE), connection tracking, NAT, flow mirroring, hierarchical QoS. SR-IOV.
notes
BlueField-3 is a DPU (Data Processing Unit) that combines ConnectX-7 networking with 16 Arm cores (P-Series) or 8 Arm cores (E-Series). It offloads networking, storage, and security processing from the host CPU. Key specs from user guide: 400Gb/s (NDR), 200Gb/s (NDR200), or 100Gb/s (HDR100). 2 QSFP112 ports. PCIe Gen5 x16. 32GB DDR5 (DPU) or 16GB DDR5 (SuperNIC). Device ID 41692. The DPU runs DOCA SDK for programmability. Offloads: SDN (OVS, overlays), storage (NVMe-oF, GPUDirect Storage), security (IPsec/TLS/MACsec inline encryption, secure boot, zero-trust). For distributed inference, the DPU handles the network interface and can offload collective communication processing, freeing the host CPU for model execution.
way
each

Notes

BlueField-3 is a DPU (Data Processing Unit) that combines ConnectX-7 networking with 16 Arm cores (P-Series) or 8 Arm cores (E-Series). It offloads networking, storage, and security processing from the host CPU. Key specs from user guide: 400Gb/s (NDR), 200Gb/s (NDR200), or 100Gb/s (HDR100). 2 QSFP112 ports. PCIe Gen5 x16. 32GB DDR5 (DPU) or 16GB DDR5 (SuperNIC). Device ID 41692. The DPU runs DOCA SDK for programmability. Offloads: SDN (OVS, overlays), storage (NVMe-oF, GPUDirect Storage), security (IPsec/TLS/MACsec inline encryption, secure boot, zero-trust). For distributed inference, the DPU handles the network interface and can offload collective communication processing, freeing the host CPU for model execution.

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