I’ve been watching the AI hype cycle the same way I watch most hype cycles: from a safe distance. Mildly amused, occasionally curious, but never fully buying in.
The nVidia (Mellanox) Bluefield-2 DPU was created to solve the problem of doing trusted networking with untrusted workloads in large scale datacenters. With the nVidia Bluefield-2, users get access to a completely isolated (trusted) compute capability that sits in the flow of the traffic (in SmartNIC mode):
This is the start of a series of posts.
I’ve had a personal goal to start exploring FPGAs for a long time. As a software engineer, I was always drawn to the performance side: debugging, profiling, getting as close to the metal as possible.
This post documents my quest for finding boards with high end FPGA devices and peripherals for reasonable prices.
Used SmartNICs I started looking at accelerators and first generation SmartNICs.
This post describes bringing up the Microsoft Storey Peak board (under Windows).
Software setup All community work done before on this board was done using the Linux OS.
We recently did a complete home renovation of the groundfloor. Improvements included floorheating, improved insulation and HR++ windows. As a side effect of modern building standards, we have a lot less ’natural ventilation’ now.
