NVIDIA DOCA SDK
NVIDIA DOCA SDK
Data Center Infrastructure on a Chip Architecture
The NVIDIA® DOCA 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.

The DOCA SDK enables developers to create network, storage, security, management, and AI/HPC applications and services for NVIDIA BlueField DPUs. DOCA provides a highly flexible environment for developing containerized applications and services that run on NVIDIA BlueField DPUs while seamlessly leveraging embedded hardware accelerators and programmable engines to boost performance.
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.
100% Software Defined
NVIDIA DOCA is a highly programmable SDK which integrates industry-standard open APIs for software-defined networking and storage, security services, and programmable P4 functionality.
Key SDK Components
- Industry-standard APIs: DPDK, SPDK, P4
- Network acceleration SDK: ASAP2 SDN, emulated VirtIO, P4, 5T for 5G technology
- Security acceleration SDK: inline cryptography, deep packet inspection
- Storage acceleration SDK: storage emulation and virtualization, crypto and compression
- RDMA acceleration SDK: UCX, RDMA verbs, GPUDirect®
- Management SDK: deployment, provisioning, service orchestration
- User space and kernel

BlueField DPU OS and Drivers

- The BlueField DOCA SDK for Arm is packaged with different OS flavors and includes the bootloader, OS kernel, necessary NIC firmware, NVIDIA® drivers, sample filesystem, toolchain, and more coming certified as part of the NGC™ catalog.
- Ubuntu Server 20.04 ships with the NVIDIA BlueField DPUs as commercial-grade Linux distribution with continuous OS and security updates.
- BlueOS ships with the NVIDIA BlueField DPU Controller. BlueOS is a reference Linux distribution based on the Yocto Poky distribution.
- BlueField DOCA SDK will also be available as a standalone package without a bundled OS that can be installed on popular OSs for Arm and x86 architecture.
Resources
BlueField DPU Software Downloads
To experience DOCA today, download the BlueField DPU software package below that enables developers to experience BlueField DPU capabilities and create applications that leverage its rich feature set with DOCA runtime accelerated libraries for networking, security, and storage
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