The Intel Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) is an open source software library for Linux User Space applications that enables higher levels of packet processing throughput, that gives application developers the ability to address compute and I/O intensive workloads, typically found in Telecom and networking use cases, on general purpose, Intel architecture-based processors, without the need of dedicated hardware.
This paper, titled Intel Data Plane Development Kit (Intel DPDK) with VMware vSphere, describes the solution, result of a VMware and Intel partnership aimed to migrate legacy solutions into virtualized, cloud-ready, data centers.