Data center chip maker Fungible Inc. said today it’s buying a cloud software company called Cloudistics Inc. as it bids to make compute infrastructure more efficient.

Fungible, which is led by Chief Executive Pradeep Sindhu (pictured), one of the founders of Juniper Networks Inc., has developed a special kind of chip called a data processing unit or DPU that’s specifically designed to process packets of data. It works by offloading this processing work from the server’s main central processing unit in order to free up resources for other tasks, and helps to improve efficiency by an order of magnitude, the company claims.

Fungible calls its chip a “supercharged traffic controller” that sends and receives packets, compresses the data to save bandwidth and encrypts it for security. In addition, the DPU can also accommodate specialized processors such as graphics cards that power artificial intelligence workloads.

The company says its chip is needed because CPU performance is advancing at a much slower place than previously, when the number of transistors in processors used to double every two years. That doesn’t happen now, and it means today’s chips struggle to keep up with the increased computing needs of modern data center workloads.

“So many people have worked on the problem of building general purpose processors, faster and faster, better and better,” Sindhu said last year in an interview on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio. “There’s not a lot left in that tank; the architecture has now played out. The pursuit of what’s next is what led me to start my second company.”

But Fungible’s DPU is only one element of the “composable hyperdisaggregated data center infrastructure” that it’s trying to build. It also sells software that includes a set of centralized cluster services to provide management, control and visibility for Fungible DPU-enabled products. It’s this that Cloudistics can help advance, Sindhu said.

Cloudistics has built software that simplifies application and infrastructure management by aggregating compute, storage and network resources, which can then be carved into independent virtual data centers and delegated to users or external customers.

“The second, equally important part, is to build software that dynamically composes disaggregated DPU-powered servers into one or more computational clusters, each designed to run a specific workload,” Sindhu said. “With these two parts working together synergistically we are taking a leap forward toward the holy grail of providing high performance and high agility in data centers–a goal that has remained elusive until now.”

“The Fungible DPU enables data centers to be built from a small number of server types, greatly simplifying composability and enabling resources to move where demands are,” said Cloudistics Chief Technology Officer Srinidhi Varadarajan. “The acquisition combines the strengths of two companies with very complementary core competencies.”

Here’s more background on Fungible, from Sindhu:

Photo: SiliconANGLE