Question

A cloud provider is building a multi-tenant GPU cluster where each node must isolate tenant network traffic, run software-defined networking, and offload storage virtualization from the host CPUs without consuming GPU-adjacent compute resources. The architecture team is choosing between two network adapter options for the compute nodes. Which adapter best meets these requirements?

Accepted Answer

A BlueField DPU, which combines a high-speed NIC with programmable Arm cores to offload networking, storage, and security services from the host

Answer

A standard ConnectX SmartNIC, which provides high-throughput connectivity but relies on the host CPU for SDN and storage virtualization

Answer

A PCIe retimer card, which extends signal integrity across long PCIe traces for additional GPUs

Answer

An NVSwitch module, which provides all-to-all GPU bandwidth within the node