The Open Programmable Infrastructure (or OPI) is an open-source effort within the Linux Foundation to develop a standard API for utilizing SmartNICs, DPUs and IPUs, and other coprocessors or processing elements. It will allow users to provision and orchestrate all devices in the same way, thus allowing them to handle many different devices, implement new devices, and change or replace devices without learning a new command structure. It will also allow manufacturers to create a standard API, deliver new or upgraded devices faster, and benefit from a large ecosystem. It makes learning curves for new devices shorter and implementation or software errors easier to find. It opens new markets for devices and eliminates concerns over one-of-a-kind implementations.

This session will explore the goals and progress that the OPI project has undertaken. DPUs have many different use cases implemented by many different vendors. Our goal is to define a common framework for all of these devices to meet those use cases: This includes Infrastructure/ workload isolation, Security, Network offload and acceleration, and Storage offload and acceleration. Over the last year since OPI joined the Linux foundation we have welcomed 14 member companies to our project spanning the landscape from vendors, to integrators, to test infrastructure vendors, end users, as well as operating system and ISV vendors. We have sought to create common provisioning and lifecycle management frameworks, defined APIs for the management of these devices to meet the most common use cases we have researched from end users, and developed a developer platform and lab to test and explore these common frameworks.

Come listen to industry experts as we explore the DPU/IPU ecosystem and the OPI project’s progress toward a common set of frameworks, and how these assist end users with ease of deployment, lowers the total cost of development and ownership, and thus provides for broader adoption of this new class of devices.

10:35 – 11:25 am PT: Disaggregated Storage using OPI and Marvell Octeon DPUs

Speaker: Satananda Burla, Member of the OPI TSC and Senior Staff Member at Marvell 

A prominent trend in disaggregated storage is the use of Non-Volatile Memory Express over Fabric (NVME-oF) and in particular, NVMe over TCP to connect storage devices over a network. But there is no straightforward to provide this storage to Virtual machines and containers. The hypervisor will still need to emulate virtio-blk or virtio-scsi kind of emulated interfaces to expose this storage which involves usage of hypervisor processor cycles. Marvell Octeon DPUs provide a local NVMe to remote NVMeOF storage offload, where the NVMe devices can appear as local PCIe controllers to the VMs and containers but can reach to namespaces provided over NVMe-OF TCP target storage with the help of the DPU without the involvement of the host.

As on-prem, hybrid and bare metal tenancy become more prevalent, most hyperscalers and datacenter operators are looking at DPUs and IPUs to provide streamlined and fine-grained control to their infrastructure. The DPU is designed to be a host-independent infrastructure endpoint that not only exposes the device’s storage services to the host but also at the same time securely exposes the device’s capabilities and provisioning control to the broader infrastructure and orchestration mechanisms. Marvell has collaborated with OPI(https://github.com/opiproject) to this end to expose the Octeon DPUs’ NVMe based storage Infrastructure offload capabilities. This talk will explore the details and capabilities of this solution.

11:35 am – 12:25 pm PT: Open Programmable (OPI) Project’s DPU/IPU Related Demos of our PoC and Lab Efforts

Speaker: Dan Daly, Member of the OPI TSC and Senior Principal Engineer at Intel, and Mircea Dan Gheorghe, Director at Keysight Technologies

The Open Programmable Infrastructure (or OPI) is an open-source effort within the Linux Foundation to develop a standard API for utilizing SmartNICs, DPUs and IPUs, and other coprocessors or processing elements. It will allow users to provision and orchestrate all devices in the same way, thus allowing them to handle many different devices, implement new devices, and change or replace devices without learning a new command structure. It will also allow manufacturers to create a standard API, deliver new or upgraded devices faster, and benefit from a large ecosystem. It makes learning curves for new devices shorter and implementation or software errors easier to find. It opens new markets for devices and eliminates concerns over one-of-a-kind implementations. One of the ways we have made progress in this open source project is to create a PoC/Developer reference stack to demonstrate the common set of frameworks we have defined for interacting with DPU and IPU infrastructure.

This session will use demos to explore the reference implementations of our Cloud Networking API, IPSec, storage and regression testing efforts being developed by the OPI community. This session will also explore the Lab infrastructure being used and developed by OPI to test and showcase the benefits OPI brings to this new class of devices.

Learn more about the event on the main SDC website here.