In 2023, the Open Programmable Infrastructure (OPI) Project has continued to build on foundational work from the previous year, making significant progress in fostering a community-driven, standards-based open ecosystem for next-generation architectures based on data processing units (DPUs) and infrastructure processing units (IPUs). OPI’s key objectives have evolved to include defining a common architecture for DPU/IPU software stacks, fostering an open source application ecosystem, and collaborating on standards and best practices for DPU/IPU deployment and management. These efforts are designed to lower costs, accelerate market time, and offer users more choices and flexibility, thereby improving performance, efficiency, and security in cloud and datacenter infrastructures.
Industry giants, including Dell Technologies, F5, Intel, NVIDIA, and Red Hat, launched the project in 2021, and this year, we welcomed Arm as a premier member and Fujitsu as a general member. Other members include Keysight Technologies, Marvell, Tencent, ZTE, DreamBig Semiconductors Hewlett Packard Enterprise and SolidRun.
Members collaborate on the technical strategy for the project through various working groups, such as API and Behavioral Model; Provisioning and Platform Management; Developer Platform/ PoC/Reference Architecture; Use Case; and Outreach. The OPI has been particularly active in outreach and education. The project hosted a half-day tutorial at the SmartNIC Summit in June, showcasing the project’s activities and working groups.
In 2023, the OPI created a lab where project members and community contributors can conduct CI/CD to test example hardware. These efforts build on the project’s 2022 goals to simplify network, storage, and security APIs, thereby facilitating more portable and performant applications across both cloud and datacenter environments. The groundwork that the OPI laid in 2022 and its progress in 2023 set the stage for it to play a major role in developing and adopting DPU/IPU technology, promising a future of increased innovation and competition in the market.
We invite you to join the OPI community by attending a Working Group meeting. Learn more, add the meetings to your calendar or subscribe to the mailing lists or slack channels here: https://opiproject.org/project/working-groups/.
