ByteDance Opens Server Products Based on DPU Board for External Businesses

According to a report by Jiemian News on July 15, informed sources have said that ByteDance’s server product “Elastic Bare Metal (EBM),” developed by the firm’s Volcengine and based on a self-developed DPU board, has been officially opened to use for external businesses.

This product is matched with the latest computing platforms of Intel and AMD, and can be purchased by external customers at Volcengine’s official website. Volcengine EBM adopts software and hardware virtualization technology, which mainly serves high bandwidth, low latency and data-intensive application scenarios, such as intelligent driving, biomedicine, network security and other fields.

DPUs (data processing units) are considered by the industry as the third important type of computing power chip in data center scenarios besides CPUs and GPUs. Volcengine is a cloud services platform owned by ByteDance. In early 2020, it began to develop its own DPU board business, which is also known as intelligent network cards, mainly solving the problems of virtualization unloading and storage optimization. Although the core of DPU originates from the IaaS field of cloud computing, Volcengine sees the value of DPU intelligent network cards in PaaS, SaaS and storage fields, in combination with Douyin and other businesses.

In terms of management architecture, the self-developed DPU boards belong to the innovation center of Volcengine cloud computing business, with the goal of exploring the business that can be done in the next five years. According to insiders, the company’s ROI requirements for the self-developed DPU sector are not as clear as other projects, nor are they done after evaluating the investment and income. “The company encourages active exploration in innovative business, and there will be moderate investments in manpower and finance. At present, although the team size is not large, it can support the basic requirements of self-developed DPU boards.”

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Last year, Volcengine launched its first generation of DPU intelligent network cards with a network bandwidth of 32Gbps, a forwarding capacity of 1000W PPS and a stored IOPS of about 30W. Although there is still a certain gap between the first-generation products and the top level in the industry, it is a great achievement to apply them on a large scale in only one year. This product realizes minute-level resource delivery during the Spring Festival activities in Douyin, ensuring a smooth user experience.