Open Programmable Infrastructure Project Announces New Lab for Testing

The OPI Project will be at ONE Summit on April 29-May 1 to showcase new lab demos

SAN FRANCISCO, California – April 29, 2024: 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 Data Processing Units (DPUs) and Infrastructure Processing Units (IPUs) technology, announces a new resource lab to test and explore a common provisioning and lifecycle management framework. The new lab will be initially used for CI/CD operations as the project builds and tests OPI-related code. The Lab will also help project members create demos and proofs of concept as new use cases are explored.

Launched in June 2021 under the Linux Foundation, the OPI project is focused on utilizing open software and standards, as well as frameworks and toolkits, to enable the rapid adoption of DPU/IPUs. Premier members include Arm, Dell Technologies, F5, Intel, Keysight Technologies, Marvell, NVIDIA, Red Hat, Tencent, and ZTE and general members include Dream Big Semiconductor, Fujitsu, HPE and SolidRun. These member companies work together to create an ecosystem of blueprints and standards to ensure that compliant DPUs work with any server. Additionally, they will collaborate in the lab to test hardware for conformance, portability, interoperability and compatibility.

“With the new OPI Project Lab, members can contribute hardware to help validate the compatibility and interoperability of the common DPU/IPU framework,” said Paul Pindell, principal architect at F5. “As we test the framework, we will create demos that will offer ease of use and portability capabilities, which will ultimately drive adoption.”

The OPI Lab is currently located in California and is available for use by all members. To best serve the project mission, all tests focus on:

• Reliability: always running without a false positive result
• Neutrality: executing the same automatic tests and configurations on all HW/SW platforms
• Security: access is controlled to avoid unexpected changes

“With collaboration from integrators and end users, as well as operating system and ISV vendors, the OPI Project has the opportunity to change how infrastructure services can be deployed and managed,” said Venkat Pullela, chief of technology, networking at Keysight Technologies and new Chair of the OPI Project Governing Board. “The new lab will help the OPI Project create an open ecosystem for next generation data centers, private clouds, and edge deployments.”

Open Networking & Edge (ONE) Summit

LF Networking (LFN), the de-facto collaboration ecosystem for Open Source Networking projects, hosts Open Networking and Edge (ONE) Summit April 29 - May 1 in San Jose, Calif. ONE Summit is a robust, cross-industry ecosystem gathering of collaborative discussions within the broader open networking and edge space, with a focus on the next phase of innovation.

The agenda includes a presentation by Paul Pindell, chair of the OPI Project Outreach Working Group, on Tuesday, April 30 at 2 pm titled “How Open Programmable Infrastructure (OPI) Improves Portability of Cloud & Data Center Applications.” Add it to your schedule here.

As a Bronze sponsor of ONE Summit, OPI Project has a booth in the sponsor showcase. Project members from F5, Dell, Keysight Technologies, NVIDIA and more will be on-site to walk through demos and answer questions. The demos shown will be in the areas of initial provisioning, lifecycle management, and application deployment on DPU/IPUs.

To learn more about ONE Summit or to register for the event, click here.

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