OPI Summit on DPUs/IPUs 2026

DPUs and IPUs can move networking, security, storage, telemetry, and other infrastructure services away from host CPUs. The operational challenge is that different devices expose different discovery, lifecycle, endpoint, forwarding, and evidence models.
This session introduces Open DSE (open variant of vSphere's DSE), a demo-ready open-source framework for expressing, executing, and validating DPU/IPU infrastructure-offload workflows. . Users express the required outcome through one control point, while Open DSE validates the topology, applies readiness gates, maps VFs and representors or equivalent endpoints, configures forwarding, runs traffic, collects evidence, generates a report, and safely removes only the state created by the experiment.
The session includes a live hardware demonstration of two KVM/QEMU virtual machines communicating through a DPU-controlled forwarding path, followed by evidence showing whether the flow was configured in software or offloaded to hardware. The talk will also share where attempted abstraction succeeds, where it fails, and what those results suggest for OPI APIs, operators, blueprints, and interoperability testing