OPI (Open Programmable Infrastucture)

A new class of cloud and datacenter infrastructure is emerging into the marketplace. This new infrastructure element, often referred as Data Processing Unit (DPU) or Infrastructure Processing Unit (IPU), takes the form of a server hosted PCIe add-in card or on-board chip(s), containing one or more ASIC’s or FPGA's, usually anchored around a single powerful SoC device. The DPU/IPU-like devices have their roots in the evolution of SmartNIC devices but separate themselves from that legacy in several important ways. The OPI project has been created to address these questions and to foster the emergence of such an open and creative software eco-system for DPU/IPU based cloud infrastructure. The project intends to delineate what a DPU/IPU is, to loosely define a framework(s) and architecture for a DPU/IPU-based software stack(s) applicable to any vendors hardware solution, to allow the creation of a rich open source application ecosystem, to integrate with existing open source projects aligned to the same vision such as the Linux kernel, IPDK.io, DPDK and SPDK to create new APIs for interaction with and between the elements of the DPU/IPU ecosystem: * the DPU/IPU hardware * DPU/IPU hosted applications * the host node * remote provisioning software * remote orchestration software