The Open Compute Project has outlined a strategy to take it into its second decade and will pursue open silicon designs and do more work to enable future innovations in optical networking, AI, and immersion cooling. It was founded in 2011 when Facebook decided to share the hardware and data centre infrastructure designs it used to reach obscene scale while also becoming more efficient.
The strategy has two aims. The first is titled meet the market and has the following four goals, delivering scalable, modular components, and open interfaces to enable vanity-free hardware development; provide common, secure manageability across platforms at cloud scale and deliver solutions that can be leveraged from the cloud to the edge, increase standardisation on metrics for utilisation, supply-side resource consumption, and OCP-certified sustainable design practices and operating modes as well as improving scale adoptions of OCP design through streamlined certifications of vertical solution stacks.
The second aim is titled the seed future innovation and has the following goals, lead in defining market requirements for process and technology transitions for optimal convergence, define interfaces for future co-packaging to enable best-in-class components from the silicon up and drive tools and reference platform standards, scale AI in the marketplace and lead innovation and market adoption of AI/ML by building standardised infrastructure solutions for AI training at scale, AI inferencing, and ubiquity AI and to deliver best-in-class, advanced cooling solutions, sustainable immersion cooling and cold plate designs that support use cases from cloud to edge.
“This journey of evolving OCP’s strategy and goals with the OCP 2.0 framework is exciting,” Rebecca Weekly, chair of OCP, said. “Shifting our Community’s focus to not only address our current market needs but also help drive the future of open-source hardware innovation is critical to the success of the overall information technology industry.”