The DPDK Project consists of the telecommunications industry, network and cloud infrastructure vendors. Gold members of the project are ARM, AT&T, Cavium, Intel, Mellanox, NXP, Red Hat, and ZTE Corporation. Silver members of DPDK include 6WIND, Atomic Rules, Huawei, Spirent, and Wind River. Associate project members are Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), University of Limerick, University of Massachusetts Lowell, and Tsinghua University.
The Linux Foundation will provide a “neutral home that promotes collaboration around open source technologies, such as a technical governance model that enables the growth of developer communities.” The move will enhance the continuing DPDK open source modus: “we believe the vibrant DPDK developer community will quickly grow in their new home and fuel continued rapid innovation in open networking.”
What exactly is DPDK or the Data Plane Development Kit. It “consists of libraries to accelerate packet processing workloads running on a wide variety of CPU architectures.” Network performance, throughput and latency are increasingly important in related technologies such as wireless core and access, wireline infrastructure, routers, load balancers, firewalls, video streaming, VoIP, etc. DPDK, by utilizing very fast packet processing, increases the efficiency and speed of backbone mobile networks and voice for the cloud.
Since 2010, DPDK, founded by originally by Intel, has had “10 major releases completed including contributions from over 400 individuals from 70 different organizations.” DPDP is multiple platform oriented with support for “all major CPU architectures and NICs.” At least twenty projects rely on DPDK libraries, MoonGen, mTCP, Ostinato, Lagopus, Fast Data (FD.io), Open vSwitch, OPNFV, and OpenStack, among others.
