Abstract: With the increase of network transmission bandwidth, complex infrastructure operations in data centers oc-cupy more and more computing resources, affecting service processing performance. Data Processor Unit (DPU) is a newly developed special purpose processor. The background is to deal with the performance bottleneck caused by the exponential growth of data volume and complexity in data center. The emergence of DPU is a phased symbol of heterogeneous computing. The core problem to be solved is to reduce the total cost of ownership of the entire system and improve the efficiency of the entire computing system based on the infrastructure. That is, the load that is “inefficient in CPU proces- sing and unable to be handled by GPU” is offloaded to DPU. Firstly, the development background of DPU is introduced, and the hardware architecture of DPU is analyzed based on network processing model. Besides, DPU is compared with smart network interface card and network processor. After that, DPU programming model, DPU products and applications in the industry are introduced. Finally, the future research directions of DPU are summarized and prospected.

Key words: data center, data processing unit (DPU), heterogeneous computing, function offloading