Open Compute Project

Last updated
Open Compute Project
Formation2011;13 years ago (2011)
TypeIndustry trade group
PurposeSharing designs of data center products
Website opencompute.org

The Open Compute Project (OCP) is an organization that shares designs of data center products and best practices among companies, including Arm, Meta, IBM, Wiwynn, Intel, Nokia, Google, Microsoft, Seagate Technology, Dell, Rackspace, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, NVIDIA, Cisco, Goldman Sachs, Fidelity, Lenovo and Alibaba Group. [1] [2] [3]

Contents

Project structure

Open Compute V2 Server Open Compute Server Front.jpg
Open Compute V2 Server
Open Compute V2 Drive Tray,
2nd lower tray extended Open Compute 1U Drive Tray Bent.jpg
Open Compute V2 Drive Tray,
2nd lower tray extended

The Open Compute Project Foundation is a 501(c)(6) non-profit incorporated in the state of Delaware. Rocky Bullock serves as the Foundation's CEO and has a seat on the board of directors. As of July 2020, there are 7 members who serve on the board of directors which is made up of one individual member and six organizational members. Mark Roenigk (Facebook) is the Foundation's president and chairman. Andy Bechtolsheim is the individual member. In addition to Mark Roenigk who represents Facebook, other organizations on the Open Compute board of directors include Intel (Rebecca Weekly), Microsoft (Kushagra Vaid), Google (Partha Ranganathan), and Rackspace (Jim Hawkins). [4]

A current list of members can be found on the opencompute.org website.

History

The Open Compute Project began in Facebook as an internal project in 2009 called "Project Freedom". The hardware designs and engineering team were led by Amir Michael (Manager, Hardware Design) [5] [6] [7] and sponsored by Jonathan Heiliger (VP, Technical Operations) and Frank Frankovsky (Director, Hardware Design and Infrastructure). The three would later open source the designs of Project Freedom and co-found the Open Compute Project. [8] [9] The project was announced at a press event at Facebook's headquarters in Palo Alto on April 7, 2011. [10]

OCP projects

The Open Compute Project Foundation maintains a number of OCP projects, such as:

Server designs

Two years after the Open Compute Project had started, with regards to a more modular server design, it was admitted that "the new design is still a long way from live data centers". [11] However, some aspects published were used in Facebook's Prineville data center to improve energy efficiency, as measured by the power usage effectiveness index defined by The Green Grid. [12]

Efforts to advance server compute node designs included one for Intel processors and one for AMD processors. In 2013, Calxeda contributed a design with ARM architecture processors. [13] Since then, several generations of OCP server designs have been deployed: Wildcat (Intel), Spitfire (AMD), Windmill (Intel E5-2600), Watermark (AMD), Winterfell (Intel E5-2600 v2) and Leopard (Intel E5-2600 v3) [14] [15]

OCP Accelerator Module

OCP Accelerator Module (OAM) is a design specification for hardware architectures that implement artificial intelligence systems that require high module-to-module bandwidth. [16]

OAM is used in some of AMD's Instinct accelerator modules.

Data storage

Open Vault storage building blocks offer high disk densities, with 30 drives in a 2U Open Rack chassis designed for easy disk drive replacement. The 3.5 inch disks are stored in two drawers, five across and three deep in each drawer, with connections via serial attached SCSI. [17] This storage is also called Knox, and there is also a cold storage variant where idle disks power down to reduce energy consumption. [18] Another design concept was contributed by Hyve Solutions, a division of Synnex in 2012. [19] [20] At the OCP Summit 2016 Facebook together with Taiwanese ODM Wistron's spin-off Wiwynn introduced Lightning, a flexible NVMe JBOF (just a bunch of flash), based on the existing Open Vault (Knox) design. [21] [22]

Rack designs

The designs for a mechanical mounting system have been published, so that open racks have the same outside width (600 mm) and depth as standard 19-inch racks, but are designed to mount wider chassis with a 537 mm width (21 inches). This allows more equipment to fit in the same volume and improves air flow. Compute chassis sizes are defined in multiples of an OpenU, which is 48 mm, slightly taller than the typical 44mm rack unit.

Energy efficient data centers

The OCP has published data center designs for energy efficiency. These include power distribution at 277 VAC, which eliminates one transformer stage in typical data centers, a single voltage (12.5 VDC) power supply designed to work with 277 VAC input, and 48 VDC battery backup. [12]

Open networking switches

On May 8, 2013, an effort to define an open network switch was announced. [23] The plan was to allow Facebook to load its own operating system software onto the switch. Press reports predicted that more expensive and higher-performance switches would continue to be popular, while less expensive products treated more like a commodity (using the buzzword "top-of-rack") might adopt the proposal. [24]

The first attempt at an open networking switch by Facebook was designed together with Taiwanese ODM Accton using Broadcom Trident II chip and is called Wedge, the Linux OS that it runs is called FBOSS. [25] [26] [27] Later switch contributions include "6-pack" and Wedge-100, based on Broadcom Tomahawk chips. [28] Similar switch hardware designs have been contributed by: Edgecore Networks Corporation (Accton spin-off), Mellanox Technologies, Interface Masters Technologies, Agema Systems. [29] Capable of running Open Network Install Environment (ONIE)-compatible network operating systems such as Cumulus Linux, Switch Light OS by Big Switch Networks, or PICOS by Pica8. [30] A similar project for a custom switch for the Google platform had been rumored, and evolved to use the OpenFlow protocol. [31] [32]

Servers

Sub-project for Mezzanine (NIC) OCP NIC 3.0 specification 1v00 was released in late 2019 establishing 3 form factors: SFF, TSFF, and LFF . [33] [34]

Litigation

In March, 2015, [35] BladeRoom Group Limited and Bripco (UK) Limited sued Facebook, Emerson Electric Co. and others alleging that Facebook has disclosed BladeRoom and Bripco's trade secrets for prefabricated data centers in the Open Compute Project. [36] Facebook petitioned for the lawsuit to be dismissed, [37] but this was rejected in 2017. [38] A confidential mid-trial settlement was agreed in April 2018. [39]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sun Microsystems</span> American computer company, 1982–2010

Sun Microsystems, Inc. was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, the Network File System (NFS), and SPARC microprocessors. Sun contributed significantly to the evolution of several key computing technologies, among them Unix, RISC processors, thin client computing, and virtualized computing. Notable Sun acquisitions include Cray Business Systems Division, Storagetek, and Innotek GmbH, creators of VirtualBox. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982. At its height, the Sun headquarters were in Santa Clara, California, on the former west campus of the Agnews Developmental Center.

Floating point operations per second is a measure of computer performance in computing, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Southbridge (computing)</span> One of the two chips in the core logic chipset architecture on a PC motherboard

On older personal computer motherboards, the southbridge is one of the two chips in the core logic chipset, handling many of a computer's input/output functions. The other component of the chipset is the northbridge, which generally handles onboard control tasks.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Blade server</span> Server computer that uses less energy and space than a conventional server

A blade server is a stripped-down server computer with a modular design optimized to minimize the use of physical space and energy. Blade servers have many components removed to save space, minimize power consumption and other considerations, while still having all the functional components to be considered a computer. Unlike a rack-mount server, a blade server fits inside a blade enclosure, which can hold multiple blade servers, providing services such as power, cooling, networking, various interconnects and management. Together, blades and the blade enclosure form a blade system, which may itself be rack-mounted. Different blade providers have differing principles regarding what to include in the blade itself, and in the blade system as a whole.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">PowerEdge</span> Server computer platform

The PowerEdge (PE) line is Dell's server computer product line. PowerEdge machines come configured as tower, rack-mounted, or blade servers. Dell uses a consistent chip-set across servers in the same generation regardless of packaging, allowing for a common set of drivers and system-images.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">ProLiant</span> Line of computer servers

ProLiant is a brand of server computers that was originally developed and marketed by Compaq, Hewlett-Packard (HP), and currently marketed by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). ProLiant servers were first introduced by Compaq in 1993, succeeding their SystemPro line of servers in the high-end space.

The IBM Intelligent Cluster was a cluster solution for x86-based high-performance computing composed primarily of IBM components, integrated with network switches from various vendors and optional high-performance InfiniBand interconnects.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">HPE BladeSystem</span> Line of blade server machines by Hewlett Packard Enterprise

BladeSystem is a line of blade server machines from Hewlett Packard Enterprise that was introduced in June 2006.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Liquid Computing</span> Software company in Canada

Liquid Computing was an information technology business that sold components like servers, storage, and networking systems. It was founded in 2003, and ceased operations in 2010.

Exalogic is a computer appliance made by Oracle Corporation, commercially available since 2010. It is a cluster of x86-64-servers running Oracle Linux or Solaris preinstalled.

Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) is a data center server computer product line composed of server hardware, virtualization support, switching fabric, and management software, introduced in 2009 by Cisco Systems. The products are marketed for scalability by integrating many components of a data center that can be managed as a single unit.

NVM Express (NVMe) or Non-Volatile Memory Host Controller Interface Specification (NVMHCIS) is an open, logical-device interface specification for accessing a computer's non-volatile storage media usually attached via the PCI Express bus. The initial NVM stands for non-volatile memory, which is often NAND flash memory that comes in several physical form factors, including solid-state drives (SSDs), PCIe add-in cards, and M.2 cards, the successor to mSATA cards. NVM Express, as a logical-device interface, has been designed to capitalize on the low latency and internal parallelism of solid-state storage devices.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">StarWind Software</span> American computer storage company

StarWind Software, Inc. is a privately held Beverly, Massachusetts-based computer software and hardware appliance company specializing in storage virtualization and software-defined storage.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Virtual Computing Environment</span> American computer hardware brand

Virtual Computing Environment Company (VCE) was a division of EMC Corporation that manufactured converged infrastructure appliances for enterprise environments. Founded in 2009 under the name Acadia, it was originally a joint venture between EMC and Cisco Systems, with additional investments by Intel and EMC subsidiary VMware. EMC acquired a 90% controlling stake in VCE from Cisco in October 2014, giving it majority ownership. VCE ended in 2016 after an internal division realignment, followed by the sale of EMC to Dell.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">SATA Express</span> Computer device interface

SATA Express is a computer bus interface that supports both Serial ATA (SATA) and PCI Express (PCIe) storage devices, initially standardized in the SATA 3.2 specification. The SATA Express connector used on the host side is backward compatible with the standard SATA data connector, while it also provides two PCI Express lanes as a pure PCI Express connection to the storage device.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dell Technologies PowerFlex</span> Software-defined storage product

Dell Technologies PowerFlex, is a commercial software-defined storage product from Dell Technologies that creates a server-based storage area network (SAN) from local server storage using x86 servers. It converts this direct-attached storage into shared block storage that runs over an IP-based network.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Immersion cooling</span> IT cooling practice

Immersion cooling is an IT cooling practice by which complete servers are immersed in a dielectric, electrically non-conductive fluid that has significantly higher thermal conductivity than air. Heat is removed from a system by putting the coolant in direct contact with hot components, and circulating the heated liquid through heat exchangers. This practice is highly effective because liquid coolants can absorb more heat from the system, and are more easily circulated through the system, than air. Immersion cooling has many benefits, including but not limited to: sustainability, performance, reliability and cost.

QCT is a provider of data center hardware and cloud solutions that are used by hyperscale data center operators.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nvidia DGX</span> Line of Nvidia produced servers and workstations

The Nvidia DGX represents a series of servers and workstations designed by Nvidia, primarily geared towards enhancing deep learning applications through the use of general-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU). These systems typically come in a rackmount format featuring high-performance x86 server CPUs on the motherboard.

Inspur Server Series is a series of server computers introduced in 1993 by Inspur, an information technology company, and later expanded to the international markets. The servers were likely among the first originally manufactured by a Chinese company. It is currently developed by Inspur Information and its San Francisco-based subsidiary company - Inspur Systems, both Inspur's spinoff companies. The product line includes GPU Servers, Rack-mounted servers, Open Computing Servers and Multi-node Servers.

References

  1. Metz, Cade (11 Apr 2015). "How Facebook Changed the Basic Tech That Runs the Internet". Wired.
  2. "Incubation Committee". Open Compute. Retrieved 2016-08-19.
  3. "Open Compute Project".
  4. "Organization and Board". Open Compute. Archived from the original on 2015-09-26. Retrieved 2015-09-12.
  5. "Facebook Follows Google to Data Center Savings". Data Center Knowledge. 2009-11-27. Retrieved 2020-12-13.
  6. "Oxide Computer Company: On the Metal: Amir Michael". Oxide Computer Company. Retrieved 2020-12-13.
  7. "Facebook Hacks Shipping Dock Into World-Class Server Lab". Wired. ISSN   1059-1028 . Retrieved 2020-12-13.
  8. "Why I Started the Open Compute Project – Vertex Ventures" . Retrieved 2020-12-13.
  9. "Introducing the Open Compute Project - YouTube". www.youtube.com. Retrieved 2020-12-13.
  10. "Facebook Opens its Server, Data Center Designs". Data Center Knowledge. 2011-04-07. Retrieved 2020-12-13.
  11. Metz, Cade (January 16, 2013). "Facebook Shatters the Computer Server Into Tiny Pieces". Wired. Retrieved July 9, 2013.
  12. 1 2 Michael, Amir (February 15, 2012). "Facebook's Open Compute Project". Stanford EE Computer Systems Colloquium. Stanford University. (video archive)
  13. Schnell, Tom (January 16, 2013). "ARM Server Motherboard Design for Open Vault Chassis Hardware v0.3 MB-draco-hesperides-0.3" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on October 23, 2014. Retrieved July 9, 2013.
  14. Data Center Knowledge (April 28, 2016). "Guide to Facebook's Open Source Data Center Hardware" . Retrieved May 13, 2016.
  15. Register, The (January 17, 2013). "Facebook rolls out new web and database server designs". The Register . Retrieved May 13, 2016.
  16. Ledin, Jim (2020-04-30). Modern Computer Architecture and Organization. Birmingham Mumbai: Packt Publishing Ltd. p. 361. ISBN   978-1-83898-710-7.
  17. Mike Yan and Jon Ehlen (January 16, 2013). "Open Vault Storage Hardware V0.7 OR-draco-bueana-0.7" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on May 21, 2013. Retrieved July 9, 2013.
  18. "Under the hood: Facebook's cold storage system". May 4, 2015. Retrieved May 13, 2016.
  19. "Hyve Solutions Contributes Storage Design Concept to OCP Community". News release. January 17, 2013. Archived from the original on April 14, 2013. Retrieved July 9, 2013.
  20. Malone, Conor (January 15, 2012). "Torpedo Design Concept Storage Server for Open Rack Hardware v0.3 ST-draco-chimera-0.3" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on May 21, 2013. Retrieved July 9, 2013.
  21. Petersen, Chris (March 9, 2016). "Introducing Lightning: A flexible NVMe JBOF" . Retrieved May 13, 2016.
  22. "Wiwynn Showcases All-Flash Storage Product with Leading-edge NVMe Technology". March 9, 2016. Retrieved May 13, 2016.
  23. Jay Hauser for Frank Frankovsky (May 8, 2013). "Up next for the Open Compute Project: The Network". Open Compute blog. Retrieved June 16, 2019.
  24. Chernicoff, David (May 9, 2013). "Can Open Compute change network switching?". ZDNet. Retrieved July 9, 2013.
  25. "Facebook Open Switching System (FBOSS) from Facebook". SDxCentral . Archived from the original on October 1, 2018 via Internet Archive.
  26. "Introducing "Wedge" and "FBOSS," the next steps toward a disaggregated network". Meet the engineers who code Facebook. June 18, 2014. Retrieved 2016-05-13.
  27. "Facebook Open Switching System ("FBOSS") and Wedge in the open". Meet the engineers who code Facebook. March 10, 2015. Retrieved 2016-05-13.
  28. "Opening designs for 6-pack and Wedge 100". Meet the engineers who code Facebook. March 9, 2016. Retrieved 2016-05-13.
  29. "Accepted or shared hardware specifications". Open Compute. Retrieved 2016-05-13.
  30. "Current Network Operating System (NOS) List". Open Compute. Retrieved 2016-05-13.
  31. Metz, Cade (May 8, 2013). "Facebook Rattles Networking World With 'Open Source' Gear". Wired. Retrieved July 9, 2013.
  32. Levy, Steven (April 17, 2012). "Going With the Flow: Google's Secret Switch to the Next Wave of Networking". Wired. Retrieved July 9, 2013.
  33. "Server/Mezz - OpenCompute". www.opencompute.org. Retrieved 2022-11-09.
  34. Kumar, Rohit (2022-05-02). "OCP NIC 3.0 Form Factors The Quick Guide". ServeTheHome. Retrieved 2022-11-09.
  35. "BladeRoom Group Limited et al v. Facebook, Inc". Justia. Retrieved 18 February 2017.
  36. "ORDER granting in part and denying in part 128 Motion to Dismiss". Justia. Retrieved 18 February 2017.
  37. Greene, Kat (10 May 2016). "Facebook Wants Data Center Trade Secrets Suit Tossed". Law360. Retrieved 8 March 2017.
  38. SVERDLIK, YEVGENIY (17 February 2017). "Court Throws Out Facebook's Motion to Dismiss Data Center Design Lawsuit". Data center Knowledge. Retrieved 8 March 2017.
  39. "Facebook settles $365m modular datacentre IP theft case with UK-based BladeRoom Group". Computer Weekly. 11 April 2018. Retrieved 15 March 2019.