NVIDIA DOCA SDK
NVIDIA DOCA Software
Data Center Infrastructure-on-a-Chip Architecture
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.
If you are already a member of the DOCA Early Access program, go directly to getting started here.

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.
SDK Key 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 OS includes the bootloader, OS kernel, necessary NIC firmware, NVIDIA drivers, sample filesystem, and toolchain – all 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.
- DOCA software is available on every leading operating system as a standalone package without a bundled OS for Arm and x86 architectures.
DOCA Ecosystem Partners
NVIDIA is working with leading platform vendors and partners to integrate and expand DOCA support for commercial distributions on NVIDIA BlueField DPUs.
Resources
- Dev Blog | NVIDIA Continues BlueField DPU/DOCA Momentum with the Release of DOCA 1.1
- White Paper | DPU-Based Hardware Acceleration: A Software Perspective
- DevNews | NVIDIA Delivers DOCA SDK to Accelerate and Secure Next Generation Data Centers
- Dev Blog | Accelerating Solution Development with DOCA on NVIDIA BlueField DPUs
- Programming the Entire Data Center Infrastructure with the NVIDIA DOCA SDK
- Detecting Out-of-Band Malware with NVIDIA BlueField DPU
- BlueField DPU Quick-Start Guide
- BlueField DPU Software Manual
BlueField DPU Runtime and Driver Downloads
Thank you for your interest in the BlueField DPU and the associated DOCA Software Framework. By downloading, installing or using the DOCA software, you agree to be bound by the terms and conditions of the DOCA EULA.
Download the BlueField DPU runtime images below.