OPI Summit on DPUs/IPUs 2026

DPUs and SuperNICs sit at the center of AI factories, HPC and hyperscaler networking, but the hardware is still mostly locked behind vendor employment. Open-source software solved contributor access decades ago. Hardware has not. That leaves the infrastructure-acceleration contributor pipeline artificially narrow when the industry needs it wide.

This talk follows one path through OPI's open model: CS student with no STEM pipeline, Red Hat intern on DPU/SmartNIC work, then OPI LFX mentee who brought the DPU Operator into OPI as upstream. We cover the technical work of that handoff (decoupling OpenShift-specific dependencies, supporting vanilla Kubernetes, validating Fedora/CentOS Stream/AlmaLinux via bootable containers, and standing up multi-vendor community CI) and show how open labs and mentorship produce both working code and working engineers. From there, OPI steers the project.

Attendees leave with a concrete model for growing the DPU/IPU contributor base by solving the hardware access problem, as well as the software one.