Paper Title: DPUs in Open Infrastructure Deployments

Paper Abstract: SmartNIC DPUs can be used in open infrastructure deployments such as OVN with OpenStack. The network control plane components that used to run on hypervisor hosts now run on SmartNIC DPU hosts. The result is increased security and performance as well as ability to handle more advanced infrastructure use cases. However, certain control plane components must be modified to account for the change. Work is proceeding on addressing the problems in the OVN and OpenStack projects to enable SmartNIC DPUs to work natively in OpenStack deployments and create a baseline design for other infrastructure projects utilizing OVN such as Kubernetes or LXD.

Paper Author: Frode Nordahl, Senior Engineer (OpenStack), Canonical
Dmitry Shcherbakov, Sr Engineer, Canonical

Author Bio: Frode Nordahl is a Sr Engineer at Canonical, where he develops software for ease of deployment and operations at scale. He has worked on development and scaling of systems, networking, and virtualization for over 20 years. He is the Core Developer for the OpenStack Charms Project, a collection of Charmed Operators used to deploy and manage enterprise grade OpenStack clouds. Before joining Canonical, he worked at PowerTech Information Systems, a Norwegian Internet services provider.

Author 2 Bio: