The NVIDIA^® DOCA^™ SDK (software development kit) enables developers to rapidly create applications and services on top of NVIDIA BlueField® data processing units (DPUs), leveraging industry-standard APIs.

With DOCA, program the data center infrastructure of tomorrow by creating high-performance, software-defined, cloud-native, DPU-accelerated services to address the increasing performance and security demands of modern data centers.

DOCA unlocks data center innovation by enabling developers to rapidly create applications and services on top of NVIDIA DPUs, leveraging industry-standard APIs. Together, DOCA and the BlueField DPU enable the development of applications that deliver breakthrough networking, security, and storage performance with a comprehensive, open development platform. BlueField isolates the infrastructure service domain from the workload domain to offer significant improvements in application and server performance, security, and efficiency, giving developers all the tools they need to realize the optimal, secure, accelerated data center.

DOCA software consists of an SDK and a runtime environment.The DOCA SDK provides industry-standard open APIs and frameworks, including Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) and P4 for networking and security and the Storage Performance Development Kit (SPDK) for storage. The frameworks simplify application offload with integrated NVIDIA acceleration packages. The DOCA-based services are exposed in the compute nodes as industry-standard I/O interfaces, enabling infrastructure virtualization and isolation.

The SDK supports a range of operating systems and distributions and includes drivers, libraries, tools, documentation, and example applications. DOCA runtime includes tools for provisioning, deploying, and orchestrating containerized services on hundreds or thousands of DPUs across the data center.

Future Proof

DOCA provides multi-generational support to offer developers the confidence that applications developed today will consistently run with added performance benefits on all future generations of BlueField.

Offload, Accelerate, Isolate Infrastructure

Network, storage and security services are offloaded, accelerated and isolated on the DPU while data is securely delivered to workloads at wire speed.

Open Ecosystem

DOCA offers a software application framework to accelerate ecosystem development.

Download the BlueField DPU runtime images below.