 Hi, this is your host, Sapil Bhartiya. And today we have with us, Amir Badani, Vice President of Developer Ecosystem Strategy at NVIDIA. Amir, it's great to have you on the show. Thank you, glad to be here. Today we are going to talk about the open programmable infrastructure or OPI project. So first of all, give us a brief kind of overview of the project. What is it all about? What is the goal behind the project? Yeah, so OPI stands for open programmable infrastructure. And as you mentioned, rightly mentioned, we announced it last week that it's part of one of the projects of the Linux Foundation. So that was sort of the announcement last week. The main goal of OPI is really focusing on how to operationalize and standardize DPUs of sort of new class of infrastructure processors in your data center. So if you sort of think about over the last several years, there have been a lot of noise around this new class of processors that really focus on infrastructure applications and how you can offload, accelerate, and isolate those infrastructure applications. But what hasn't happened is a standard operating model on how to operationalize these new class of processors in your data center. So every vendor has a different way to provision lifecycle manage, different programming models, how to build on top of these different infrastructure processors. And so that's really the culmination of why OPI came about, was to create a standard operating model and an open standard for these different class of processors that are just coming into fruition in the market. What are the core components of OPI? Yeah, so the organization actually just formed. So last week is when we announced it, but the governance model and the structure is really still being defined. But in essence, there are kind of some core subgroups that are focusing around open APIs. So what's the programming model? What are those APIs that will be exposed on top of the DPU? What is provisioning look like? How do you provision lifecycle manage troubleshoot across all these different types of DPUs in the market? Proof of concepts, like what are the proof of concepts? What are the use cases? How are people using the DPUs? How can we create a standard reference architecture for a lot of ecosystem partners and customers? And then there are other kind of non-technical subgroups around what's the mission, the charter, the business model, kind of all of those aspects. So today, OPI is really a bunch of subgroups both on the technical side and the business side that are being formed. But over time, what we intend for OPI to be is a set of APIs, an SDK, a standard reference model for provisioning all of your DPUs in your data center. But it's too early on for a lot of those components to exist today, but that's what we intend to happen over time. What kind of specific challenges this project will address, at least to start with, that you are trying to look at and make it easier for enterprise customers to consume DPUs? What really hit home for us is we have several end users that have joined OPI. And the thing that they keep selling us is that, when we use your DPU in our data center with the many applications that we have running on the DPU, you guys have a standard way to operationalize your data center. Then we use a DPU from a different vendor. It's a completely different framework. And so it's really hard for a customer to be able to have a multi-vendor approach when they are trying to stand up their data center applications. That's sort of one. The other end of the spectrum is another thing that we heard when we were kind of exploring our intent to join OPI is many of the OEM vendors, which I said, you know, a lot of them will have server-based systems with DPUs. There's just a different way to stand up a DPU in one server's vendor versus another server's vendor, another vendor server. And so when you sort of look at kind of the complexity that yields, it's in, for us, you know, I think OPI will really help solve that problem around standardization both at, you know, the server configuration level, as well as how end users are deploying DPUs in their data center. So it's kind of both ends of the spectrum. And OPI is really kind of the conforming layer to help drive a lot of that adoption in kind of standards-based approach. Since you talk about, you know, that I put up end users joining, so I also want to understand the kind of ecosystem that is going to be built around OPI because when we talk about it, there will be a lot of vendors who will be commercializing it. Of course, there will be core players who will be contributing the actual code. And then there will be a lot of users. So when we look at ecosystem, there's not one player, you know, they're different, you know, stakeholders. So talk about, you know, what kind of community you're applying to build around OPI or what kind of community is already there? Yeah, so the founding members of OPI today will have existed since last week are there are a couple of different folks. One is on the server side. We have Dell as one of the main server OEM vendors that has joined OPI as a founding member. Then you have a lot of the software vendors like F5, Red Hat that have joined OPI as a founding member. Then you have some of the testing vendors like Insight that has joined as a founding member of OPI. And then you have the semiconductor vendors and the software vendors around those semiconductor processors. And those would be kind of Intel, Marvell, and of course, NVIDIA. So you have kind of different layers of the stack in terms of the founding members. Now, I think one of the things that we'll see, and these are the founding members as I listed, and that's sort of a short list. But I think one of the things that we'll see over time is that ecosystem growing with end users. So the ones that I mentioned today are mainly software vendors, hardware vendors, testing vendors. But what we'll see over time is the ecosystem or the end users will have a motive to join to really say, hey, these are the problems that we're facing in our data center. How can all of the vendors as part of this ecosystem really drive a standard that matches what customers are seeing in their own data center? So today, the founding members are, as I mentioned, there's many more participants of OPI than there are founding members. So there's probably too broad of a list to name, but there's many more than both on the end user side as well as the hardware side as well as the software side. As much as we want to see everything be open source, I mean, there are certain industries that open source is critical. It makes a lot of sense. And then a lot of these areas where, you know, proprietary software makes sense as well. If I ask you from your perspective, what is the importance of open source in certain industries? Because that's where you folks, especially Nvidia, you get involved. So talk about that. So we can understand from your perspective, you're involved with the project and there you see the importance of open source. Yeah. Nvidia itself, we're a big believer in open source. If you sort of look at, you know, just from the networking stack, all the different contributions that we make to open source, whether it's, you know, Open vSwitch or the Linux kernel or storage, open source projects like SPDK, networking based projects like DPDK. I mean, there's many, many different open source projects that we've contributed to. Either we'd started or, you know, or second, third, fourth in terms of code contribution. So first and foremost, we believe open source is fundamentally important to our business model and our strategy. I think, you know, for us, I think the main, our main belief around open sources, you can drive products faster to market with open source. So if you sort of think about all of the contributions that you can collect across the community, it really forges the right behaviors. And so that's sort of the reason why, you know, we were so, we're so prominent in a lot of these open source projects because we believe that's, you know, how you can create change in the market. So that's sort of our belief in our conviction. I mean, thank you so much for taking the time out today and talk about this project. And more importantly, you shared the, you know, the NVIDIA's, you know, the approach towards open source. That's really important. So thanks for sharing that as well. And as there are more updates, progress of the project, I would love to have you folks back on the show, but I really appreciate your time today. Thank you. Great, thank you. Absolutely. We'd love to, as OPI progresses, and we have much more contributions by way of the community. We'd love to come back and kind of give you an update. So thank you for having us.