NVIDIA today became a founding member of the Linux Foundation’s Open Programmable Infrastructure (OPI) project, while making its NVIDIA DOCA networking software APIs widely available to drive innovation in the data center.
Businesses are embracing open data centers, which require applications and services that easily integrate with other solutions for simplified, cost-effective, and sustainable management. Moving to open NVIDIA DOCA will help develop and nurture large and vibrant DPU ecosystems and fuel unprecedented data center transformation.
The OPI project aims to create an open, standards-based, and community-driven ecosystem for accelerating networking and other data center infrastructure tasks using DPUs.
DOCA includes drivers, libraries, services, documentation, sample applications, and management tools to accelerate and simplify application development and performance. It enables flexibility and portability of BlueField applications written using accelerated drivers or low-level libraries, such as DPDK, SPDK, Open vSwitch or Open SSL. We plan to continue this support. Under OPI, developers will be able to create a common programming layer to support many of these open drivers and libraries with DPU acceleration.
The DOCA library APIs are already publicly available and documented for developers. The open license of these APIs will ensure that applications developed using DOCA will support BlueField DPUs as well as those from other vendors.
Extend the use of DPUs
AI, containers, and composable infrastructure are increasingly important for enterprise and cloud data centers. This leads to the use of DPUs in servers to support software-defined and hardware-accelerated networking, east-west traffic, and zero-trust security.
Only the widespread deployment of DPUs such as NVIDIA BlueField can support the ability to offload, accelerate and isolate data center workloads including networking, storage, security and management DevOps.
NVIDIA’s history of open innovation over the decades includes engagement with leading consortia, participation in standards committees, and contribution to a range of open source software and communities.
We frequently contribute to open-source and open-license projects and software such as Linux Kernel, DPDK, SPDK, NVMe over Fabrics, FreeBSD, Apache Spark, Free Range Routing, SONiC, Open Compute Project and other areas covering networking, virtualization, containers, AI, data science and data encryption.
NVIDIA is often among the top three code contributors for many Linux releases and DPDKs. And we have historically included an open source version of our network drivers in the Linux kernel.
With OPI, customers, ISVs, infrastructure appliance vendors, and system integrators will be able to build applications for BlueField DPUs using DOCA to achieve the best possible performance and a smoother development experience. simple for accelerated data center infrastructure.
