F5 Helps Service Providers and Enterprises Unlock Full Potential of AI Deployments with NVIDIA BlueField-3 DPUs

F5 BIG-IP Next for Kubernetes deployed on NVIDIA BlueField-3 DPUs is designed to address these issues. The solution focuses on offloading and accelerating F5 BIG-IP Next Service Proxy for Kubernetes (SPK) on NVIDIA's BlueField-3 DPUs. It builds on F5's leadership in addressing critical application delivery and security challenges during key market inflections, while leveraging NVIDIA's innovations in accelerated computing and high-performance networking.

F5 BIG-IP Next SPK was developed to solve the problems service providers faced with Kubernetes as they transitioned to 5G. 5G infrastructure is built on a cloud-native containerized architecture, with container workloads managed using Kubernetes. Yet, Kubernetes wasn't originally intended for the complex use cases required of a 5G environment. BIG-IP Next SPK helped telcos tailor Kubernetes networking for a 5G infrastructure, giving them the visibility, control, and security they needed to dynamically scale their 5G networks. Over the past several years, service providers have used BIG-IP to bring 5G technology to life for millions of subscribers.

Just as BIG-IP Next SPK played a pivotal role in enabling 5G Core for the last market inflection, it's evolving now to address the challenges of the AI market inflection and AI workload delivery, which share similarities with 5G workloads, but involve exponentially greater traffic volumes. To meet the demands of this new market inflection, F5 is releasing BIG-IP Next for Kubernetes deployed on NVIDIA BlueField-3 DPUs to effectively manage the vast traffic directed to AI servers.

This solution transforms modern application delivery to meet the demands of generative AI. It's a Kubernetes-native implementation of F5's BIG-IP platform that handles networking, security, and load balancing workloads, sitting on the demarcation point between the AI cluster and other parts of data centers. BIG-IP Next for Kubernetes maps AI cluster namespaces to data center network tenancy, delivering proper security and simplified management. By taking advantage of the BlueField-3 DPU's hardware accelerators, BIG-IP Next for Kubernetes accelerates a variety of networking and data services, optimizing energy efficiency by offloading CPU compute resources.

For example, at its Networking @Scale 2024 event earlier this year, Meta mentioned the training of its open-source learning language model (LLM) Llama 3 was hindered by network latency, which was addressed by tuning hardware-software interactions. This approach increased overall performance by 10%. While 10% may seem like a small gain, for a model that takes months to train, this improvement translates to weeks of saved time.