Compression Analysis for BlueField-2/3 DPUs: Lossy and Lossless Perspectives

Data Processing Unit (DPU) with programmable SmartNICs containing System-on-Chip (SoC) cores is now a valuable addition to the host CPU, finding use in High-Performance Computing (HPC) and data center clusters for its advanced features, notably a hardware-based data compression engine. With the convergence of Big Data, HPC, and Machine Learning, data volumes burden communication and storage, making efficient compression vital. This positions DPUs as tools to accelerate compression workloads and enhance data-intensive applications. This paper characterizes lossy (e.g., SZ3) and lossless (e.g., DEFLATE, lz4, and zlib) compression algorithms using seven real-world datasets on NVIDIA BlueField-2/3 DPUs. We explore the potential opportunities for offloading these compression workloads from the host. Our findings demonstrate that the compression engine within the DPU can achieve up to 26.8x speedup compared to its SoC core. We also provide insights on harnessing BlueField for compression, presenting seven crucial takeaways to steer future compression research with DPUs.