Mellanox MBF1L516A-ESNAT BlueField SmartNIC VPI InfiniBand & Ethernet Network Adapter Card

Package Contents

• BlueField SmartNIC VPI InfiniBand & Ethernet Network Adapter Card
• Tall Bracket

Overview
Smart programmable Ethernet and InfiniBand network adapter cards combine Arm® processing power with advanced network offloads to accelerate a multitude of security, networking and storage applications. These accelerations result in the delivery of world-leading performance, flexibility and efficiency for cloud computing and high performance computing (HPC).

The BlueField Ethernet and InfiniBand smart adapters features the BlueField system-on-chip (SoC). Delivering an innovative and high-performance programmable networking engine, Mellanox’s dualport BlueField SmartNICs offer unmatched scalability, efficiency, and performance, making them the ideal adapter cards to accelerate the most demanding data center workloads.

EFFICIENT SMARTNIC

The BlueField dual-port 100Gb/s Ethernet and InfiniBand SmartNIC accelerates a wide range of applications through flexible data and control plane offloading. Enabling a more efficient use of compute resources, BlueField adapters empower the CPU to focus on running applications rather than on networking or security processing. Additionally, as software-defined adapters, BlueField SmartNICs ensure the ultimate flexibility by adapting to future protocols and features through a simple software update.

BLUEFIELD SYSTEM-ON-CHIP

BlueField is a Mellanox family of advanced SoC solutions that integrates a coherent mesh of 64-bit Armv8 A72 cores, a ConnectX network adapter front-end and a PCI Express switch into a single chip. The powerful SoC architecture includes an Armv8 multicore processor array and enables customers to develop sophisticated applications and highly differentiated feature sets. BlueField leverages the rich Arm software ecosystem and introduces the ability to offload the x86 software stack.

At the heart of BlueField is the ConnectX-5 network offload controller with IBTA RDMA and RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) technology, delivering cutting-edge performance for networking and storage applications such as NVMe over Fabrics. Advanced features include an embedded virtual switch with programmable access lists (ACLs), transport offloads and stateless encap/decap of NVGRE, VXLAN, and MPLS overlay protocols. ConnectX-5 offers enhancements to HPC infrastructures, by providing MPI and SHMEM/PGAS and Rendezvous Tag Matching offload, hardware support for out-of-order RDMA Write and Read operations, as well as additional network atomic operations (NAOs) support.

SECURITY APPLICATIONS

BlueField Ethernet and InfiniBand smart adapters combine hardware encryption accelerators with embedded software and fully integrated advanced network capabilities, making them the ideal platform for developing proprietary security applications.

BlueField SmartNICs enable a distributed security architecture by isolating and protecting each individual workload and providing flexible control and visibility at the server and workload level, controlling risk at the server access layer. BlueField also builds security into the DNA of the data center and enables prevention, detection and real-time responses to potential threats.

BlueField SmartNICs are capable of delivering powerful functionality, including encryption of data-in-motion, bare metal provisioning, stateful L4 firewall, and more.