Open Programmable Infrastructure Project Announces First Coordinated Release, “Abstraction,” to Standardize DPU and IPU Ecosystems

Release establishes a vendor neutral API layer across 26 repositories to accelerate real-world deployment of open programmable infrastructure

Summary

• The Open Programmable Infrastructure Project has announced its first coordinated release, OPI Abstraction v0.1.0, to make DPU and IPU infrastructure easier to consume, integrate and scale.

• This technical milestone establishes a vendor neutral API layer across 26 repositories and introduces OPI Blueprints to accelerate repeatable, real-world deployments.

• The initial release features the Kubernetes Network Function Offload Blueprint, a production-grade deployment pattern developed in partnership with F5/NGINX, Intel and Red Hat.

SAN FRANCISCO, July 29, 2026 – The Open Programmable Infrastructure (OPI) Project, a community-driven initiative focused on creating a standards-based open ecosystem for next-generation architectures and frameworks based on DPU/IPU-Like (Data Processing Units)/(Infrastructure Processing Unit) technologies, today announced its first coordinated release, OPI Abstraction v0.1.0, marking an important technical milestone in making DPU/IPU infrastructure easier to consume, integrate, and scale. With this release, OPI helps break down barriers to DPU/IPU adoption, including fragmentation across proprietary SDKs, toolchains, APIs and operational models.

In conjunction with the release, OPI issued its first white paper, Accelerating the AI Era: The Critical Role of Open Programmable Infrastructure (OPI) in Scaling DPU and IPU Ecosystems. The publication explores applications in edge computing, private cloud, data centers, high-performance networking, storage disaggregation, and zero-trust security. By transforming devices into standardized infrastructure elements, OPI reduces operational complexity, eliminates duplicated validation efforts and mitigates potential vendor lock-in.

“AI is driving a fundamental shift in how organizations think about the infrastructure layer,” said Arpit Joshipura, GM and SVP, Networking, Edge and IoT at the Linux Foundation. “DPUs and IPUs offer powerful new capabilities for offload, acceleration, security, and lifecycle management, but the ecosystem needs open APIs and repeatable deployment patterns to scale. OPI’s new release and the first official OPI ‘Blueprint’ are important steps toward making programmable infrastructure more open, interoperable, and practical for real-world adoption.”

The Abstraction release establishes a vendor neutral, hardware-agnostic API layer designed to let workloads, orchestrators, and platforms program compliant DPUs without requiring hardware-specific code. OPI’s immediate focus is bridging the gap to deployment through open APIs, seamless Kubernetes integration, and ready-to-use end-user blueprints. Spanning 26 participating repositories covering APIs, bridges, tooling, Kubernetes integrations, provisioning, and observability, the release establishes a shared integration layer for programmable infrastructure. This release also introduces OPI Blueprints as a deployment-focused framework for translating open infrastructure capabilities into repeatable, production-grade solutions. The first official Blueprint, Kubernetes Network Function Offload, brings together F5/NGINX, Red Hat, and others around essential hardware, utilizing Red Hat OpenShift for orchestration and F5 NGINX as the application delivery controller.

OPI is hosting its second Summit on DPU/IPUs on October 15, 2026 at The Tech Interactive in San Jose, CA. The OPI Summit will  be hosted alongside the OCP Global Summit and is open to anyone involved in the design, development, integration, marketing, use, or support of DPU/IPUs, or related hardware, software, or services. 

To learn more about the Open Programmable Infrastructure Project, please visit https://opiproject.org/ 

Supporting Quotes

“DPUs are enabling the Trifecta of CPU/GPU//DPUs to create a programmable infrastructure layer that scales. At OPI we are creating a standard interface to this layer to make it easy to orchestrate across multiple nodes in a cluster. This layer can play an important role in enabling AI clusters at different scales, such as Scale Up, Scale Out,  Scale across and Scale Above.” 

– Venkat Pullela, CTO, AI Infrastructure, Keysight Technologies 

“We congratulate OPI on this exciting release of deployment blueprints for IPU/DPU hardware. Reusable and extendable patterns are the groundwork on which enterprises build resilient architectures, something that is incredibly critical in this emerging era of AI-powered applications."

 – Joel Moses, CTO, Systems and Platforms, F5 and Member, Governing Board, OPI 

"Bringing standardization to the infrastructure layer is essential for the future of cloud-native environments. Red Hat’s work with OPI on the Abstraction release bridges the gap between advanced hardware acceleration and scalable, open source orchestration. Participating in these community efforts is foundational to driving ecosystem-wide interoperability, allowing the next wave of infrastructure innovation to remain open, predictable, and fully integrated with community-driven platforms."

– Simon Horman, Distinguished Engineer, Red Hat, and Chair, Technical Steering Committee, OPI

Media Contact

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