Linux Foundation initiates open-source projects to improve energy efficiency and resource utilization in data centers.

Organizations exploring data-processing units (DPUs) and infrastructure processing units (IPUs) received significant backing this week when the Linux Foundation announced the Open Programmable Infrastructure (OPI) Project. DPUs, IPUs, and smartNICs are programmable networking devices designed to free up CPUs for better performance in software-defined cloud, compute, networking, storage and security services. The initiative aims to create a community that develops standards for building DPU/IPU-based architectures while developing technologies designed to simplify network, storage, and security APIs within applications to enable more portable and efficient applications in the cloud and data center across DevOps, SecOps and NetOps.

The founding members of OPI include Dell Technologies, F5, Intel, Keysight Technologies, Marvell, NVIDIA, and Red Hat. These organizations join others such as AWS and AMD that are working to build smartNICs and DPUs for deployment in edge, colocation, or service-provider networks. According to Mike Dolan, senior vice president of Projects at the Linux Foundation, "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."

Dolan noted that DPUs and IPUs are increasingly being used to support high-speed network capabilities and packet processing for applications like 5G, AI/ML, Web3, crypto, and more because of their flexibility in managing resources across networking, compute, security and storage domains. Rather than servers serving as the infrastructure unit for cloud, edge, and the data center, operators could create pools of disaggregated networking, compute, and storage resources supported by DPUs, IPUs, GPUs, and CPUs to meet their customers' application workloads and scaling requirements.

As part of the OPI announcement, NVIDIA contributed its DOCA networking software APIs to the project. DOCA includes drivers, libraries, services, documentation, sample applications, and management tools to speed up and simplify the development and performance of applications. The software allows for flexibility and portability for BlueField applications written using accelerated drivers or low-level libraries, such as DPDK, SPDK, Open vSwitch or Open SSL, with BlueField being NVIDIA's data-center services accelerator package.