Intel adds a new device – the ‘IPU’ – to its must-have modern data centre stack

Intel has added “infrastructure processing units” (IPUs) to its list of must-have data centre infrastructure, and promised it’ll build more of them and offer software to put them to work. IPUs also go by the name “SmartNICs” or “data processing units” (DPUs). As The Register tried to explain in September 2020, DPUs/IPUs/ …

[Pascal Monett]

I can't help but wonder

What kind of mischief are the miscreants going to wreak, and how are they looking at this ?

More "intelligence" on the network means more holes to slip through.

[Lord Elpuss]

Re: I can't help but wonder

I came here to post the same thing. Another attack vector to keep track of, and if it's background and not 'actively' managed then there's a distinct possibility malware nasties could sit on it for a while before being spotted.

[Ace2]

Re: I can't help but wonder

They will most definitely be actively managed by a controller agent, including telemetry.

[nautica]

These short naps are wonderful.

Yawnnn...

Three whole comments, at 1515 UTC, on an article posted at 0830 UTC.

Try looking for coins in the sidewalk cracks, Intel. It's the only thing you're qualified to do now.

[Mike 16]

Six Fives

Sounds like they need a bit of work to get to the "nine fives" that a salesdroid from a major networking vendor once pledged.

Some of us in the audience figured "this lot can just about manage that".

[Michael Wojcik]

other applications

I'm not a fan of putting general-purpose computing on NICs, but I can anticipate some other likely applications:

- TLS termination. Of course we already have systems that offload crypto from the main CPUs, so this is pretty obvious.

- Handling some trivial HTTP requests for small, rarely changing resources like favicon. HTTP filtering to block known-bad attack vectors and requests with unrecognized values in the Host header. (And similarly for SNI in the previous bullet point.)

- Telnet negotiation, which is Still A Thing for e.g. TN3270.

- Trivial microservices such as heartbeat and (lagging) load indicators, which could be updated periodically by the host system.