Open Programmable Infrastructure (OPI) Project held a half-day tutorial during the SmartNIC Summit 23 pre-conference day in San Jose, CA on June 13th, 2023. We would like to first thank the SmartNIC Summit 23 (SNS23) organizing team for affording OPI the opportunity to showcase our open source project. The SNS23 team not only provided the space and equipment for us to put on our tutorial, they did so for several other co-located tutorials from other SmartNIC related communities. SoNIC-DASH, Generative AI, and Use Case sessions were also held on the pre-conference day of the show.
The summit attracted 230 attendees from 92 companies who are leading the SmartNIC industry and ecosystem. There were DPU/IPU vendors among those in attendance from AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, Marvell, Achronix, Dream Big Semiconductor, Napatech, and others. The conference also had Ecosystem vendors who are working with these DPU/IPU vendors to create a thriving end to end solutions et for these devices, Including Dell, F5, Fujitsu, Keysight, Microsoft, Arm, Canonical, Palo Alto Networks, VMware, and many other ecosystem players. There was representation from academics and university researchers on hand as well. And finally several end user companies providing input into use cases and learning the latest state of the art for SmartNICs.
The overall conference was focused more on the DPU/IPU devices and less on the SmartNICs that were the main topic of last year’s summit.
The OPI half-day event began with Joe White providing an introduction to the OPI project and serving as the moderator for the sessions which were led by various members of the OPI community. Venkat Pullela, from Keysight Technologies, led the first session where the OPI use cases were discussed. There was a good amount of audience interaction during this session and new use cases were uncovered, which can start being investigated by the community. Next up was Dong Wei, from Arm, presenting the current state of OPI provisioning and lifecycle efforts.
Following on from that were Vipin Jain, from AMD and Mark Sanders, from Dell Technologies, discussing the latest in the area of Network and storage APIs, which the OPI community has been focused on building. Mircea Dan Gheorghe, from Keysight Technologies, was next up discussing the PoCs and demos that have so far been developed by the community and shared as the pointers to the value that the OPI project is invested in bringing to the DPU/IPU industry. The last presentation was delivered by Deb Chatterjee from Intel, and John F. Kim from NVIDIA. They showcased the value proposition of the OPI project and the future roadmap that the OPI Project is focusing upon.
The final session was a QA Panel session where audience members were able to ask any last minute questions, to seek clarification, and to provide input for the OPI team to reflect on as we
wrapped up our half day learning tutorial.
As with many conferences, the presented content was good and full of learnings to apply back into our day jobs, but the most impactful interactions were those hallway conversations and meetings over dinner or drinks where new connections were made or existing connections strengthened.
Again the OPI community wants to thank the SmartNIC Summit team for the opportunity and wants to thank our audience for their engagement, questions, suggestions, and new connections.
