The DPU can act as a PCI host or as a PCI device. In this case, it's placed into a chassis where there is no host (the backplane is only for power), acts as its

The DPU can act as a PCI host or as a PCI device. In this case, it's placed into a chassis where there is no host (the backplane is only for power), acts as its own PCI host and talks to NVME SSDs on the bus. This is a demo and is otherwise pretty absurd, but the main use-case of these devices can be to do some pre-processing on the network traffic before handing off to the host. In addition to the ARM cores, these cards have hardware capable of packet filtering/etc so it can be useful in scenarios such as DDoS mitigation where the card can easily filter out malicious traffic even at rates of millions of packets per second, and only pass through legitimate traffic to the host server.