Linux Foundation informed this week that its new OPI (Open Programmable Infrastructure) Project will promote a community-driven, standards, open ecosystem for next-generation architectures and frameworks based on DPU and IPU technology.
Aiming API simplification
Open Programmable Project is formed to help the simplification of the network, storage, and security APIs inside applications to facilitate more portable and effective applications in the cloud as well as data center over DevOps, SecOps, and NetOps. The OPI project is founded by Dell Technologies, F5, Intel, Keysight Technologies, Marvell, NVIDIA, and Red Hat, contributors from a broad range of leading companies in their fields varying from silicon and device manufacturers, ISVs, test and measurement partners, OEMs to end-users.
Mike Dolan, senior vice president of Projects at the Linux Foundation said;
« When new technologies emerge, there is so much opportunity for both technical and business innovation but barriers often include a lack of open standards and a thriving community to support them. DPUs and IPUs are great examples of some of the most promising technologies emerging today for cloud and data center, and OPI is poised to accelerate adoption and opportunity by supporting an ecosystem for DPU and IPU technologies »
Due to their flexibility in managing resources across networking, compute, security, and storage domains, DPUs and IPUs are more and more being used to support high-speed network capabilities and packet processing for applications like 5G, AI/ML, and Web3, crypto. The data center and operators can create pools of disaggregated networking, compute, and storage resources supported by DPUs, IPUs, GPUs, and CPUs to meet their clients’ application tasks and measuring requirements now.
OPI will provide to implement and develop an open and creative software ecosystem for DPU and IPU-based infrastructures. The Project intends to designate the architecture and frameworks for the DPU and IPU software loads that can be appealed to any company’s hardware services. It also intends to encourage an affluent open-source application ecosystem, influencing the existing open-source projects, such as DPDK, SPDK, OvS, P4, etc., as appropriate. The project aims to:
- Define DPU and IPU,
- Delineate vendor-agnostic frameworks and architectures for DPU- and IPU-based software stacks applicable to any hardware solutions,
- Enable the creation of a rich open-source application ecosystem,
- Integrate with existing open-source projects aligned to the same vision such as the Linux kernel, and,
- Create new APIs for interaction with, and between, the elements of the DPU and IPU ecosystem, including hardware, hosted applications, host nodes, and the remote provisioning and orchestration of software