In The Arena by TechArena - AI’s Impact on OCP: Scaling Innovation and Infrastructure Growth

Episode Date: October 22, 2024

In this episode, OCP CEO George Tchaparian shares how OCP is driving AI infrastructure innovation, fostering collaboration, and tackling scalability, efficiency, and sustainability challenges in data centers and beyond.

Welcome to the Tech Arena, featuring authentic discussions between tech's leading innovators and our host, Alison Klein. Now, let's step into the arena. Welcome in the arena. My name is Alison Klein, and we're coming to you from the OCP Summit in San Jose, California. And I am delighted to be sitting down with George Teparian, CEO of the Open Compute Foundation. Thank you so much for joining me, George.

Thank you very much for having me here. I really appreciate it, Alison. So this show, oh my God, George, 7,000 people. Never in my wildest dreams did I think that the OCP Summit would get that large. Why don't you tell me what's going on with the OCP Foundation and what is driving this massive growth? It's, of course, there are soft side and the hard side of it. I would say the real hard side of it is this whole movement of AI. We need to acknowledge that. But the soft of it is what OCP's value proposition is. Our consistency year over year of the summits and also what we provide during the year.

We do this, by the way, internationally too. We do one in Europe. We do one in China. We do one in the APAC Asia. But it's a consistency and also it's a neutrality that we bring in. Just want to make sure that people understand the fact that we don't innovate, but we bring the best of the minds together to innovate. And also because of our value proposition of how we can really find commonalities and make sure that the efficiencies of it and how people take that and use the of it, modularized way to build their own infrastructure, their own product, whatever it may be, hardware and software co-design. I think that's a value that really is resonating with everybody. When you look at the work that OCP is doing, obviously the elephant in the room is AI. And incredible focus this week on AI data center reference designs. How do you see OCP addressing the challenges,

given that there are so many architectural changes to platforms to address AI workloads? Yeah, I think that's a very fair question and very challenging question. If you look at the whole value chain, and you have to look at it from chip providers to system providers to infrastructure providers. And on top of it, you know, all the mass scale that is needed from all angles, from interconnect servers, storage, memory. We can go on and on just to make this happen. But the challenge is that what we're trying to do, like I said, with our value proposition is making sure that we bring in the commonalities. And this is where we come in with all these building blocks of innovative commonalities.

Then we look at all the efficiencies we have to bring in. We take that further down into sustainability aspects of it. We address it as a team and also try to recreate that value, that multi-vendor supply chain value. Now, having said that, it's not easy. But what we have done, we have created a team of all high-pilots, from service providers, from cloud service providers, big names that you know of, and also the chip providers, memory providers, infrastructure providers,

even sustainability, concrete concrete and so forth, and bring them together. There are 50 of them right now that are growing. We put this thing called Open System AI Strategic Initiative that we're driving. We started it last year, but it's taking shape this year. It's becoming very fruitful of bringing everybody together. And this way, some of the challenges, I'm not saying everything, but some of those challenges starting to really resolve itself when these great minds come together and they're willing to cooperate, willing to find the common grounds. I think it's

really helping to drive that efficiency we need, that effectiveness we need, and also with its sustainability. Because there's no way this is going to end or this scale if we don't really somehow manage it right. Yeah, exactly. Now, you talked about the large service providers being foundational to OCP, but OCP is not just for hyperscale. Exactly. What are you guys doing to help ensure

that the designs actually achieve the scale across environments, into the enterprise, into the edge, et cetera? Thank you for mentioning that. I think this is the greatest value we have. If you think about our, let's say, members, if you think about what we have today, we're growing, we have about 400 plus members. If you take the Harper scales out, the four or five of them, what about the 396 or 95 of them? So the way we do that is basically, again, when we do this innovative ideas, we put them in our marketplace. We have a marketplace inside OCP that is growing very

effectively. What is it? It's about showcasing sampled examples and also best possible outcome of successful stories that people can really gravitate to and take and happen. Point in case, I don't know if you were able to see it during the keynote stage, that Geico, as an example, as Enterprise came in, and within one year, honestly, within one year from when they came in and said, you want to do something, OCP, what do you have? But these guys worked so hard. I'm not going to say that word, but they worked so hard. But within a year, they were able to get where they want to go. And it's a small scale, but it is an example of how this works,

what we can do to help the enterprises, the edge, and so forth. The other way to look at this also, when you have competitors come together in our stage, we can bring them in. You've probably seen how Intel and AMD shook hands and tried to start to help each other in this x86 technology of taking forward? That really speaks volumes to how people are coming together instead of competing, cooperating, finding what they need to do to make this go forward. So that's another way of bringing those divergent ideas or let's say competitiveness into some conversions. The third element of it is when we

come together to build an infrastructure and try to be that infrastructure with as much as possible common, but with the modularity that you can really tweak and build on it, and then try to define that interfaces, which is open interfaces, then people can take that infrastructure and with the openness of that interfaces, build their own IP, their own, you that infrastructure and with the openness of that interfaces, build their own IP, their own, you know, let's say, way of satisfying a customer, whatever their solution offering is. So those are also one of our value propositions that we are really pushing forward to help. Now, one notable thing that the organization decided to do a couple of years ago is start collaborating more deeply with industry standards bodies in

bringing technology into OCP configurations. How has that gone and what has been notable in 2024 in terms of the work that you guys have done? First of all, we're not a standard body, okay? So, we want to make sure it's clear. However, what we have done is to make sure that we understood we cannot do this alone, but we also have to have the support from these standard bodies. One example would be our team collaboration with Lennox Foundation. They're an open consortium as well, but the whole aspects of hardware and software co-design is very important. The other one is Ultra Ethernet.

Initially, it's very important going forward. We're partnering with the DMTF, so just make sure that we understand that area of what we need to do. Open infra, JEDEC, universities. Other standards would be open chiplet economy. That's very important aspects of bringing all these people together. Sure. And putting this whole notion of a jigsaw puzzle,

how those chiplets come together to make a bigger chip. So those are the things that has been our trust in 2024 that's really helping drive our momentum forward. Now, I know that we're in the middle of the summit in San Jose. You're probably already thinking forward into Dublin and everything that comes in 2025. When you think about the technology curve and what OCP is working on together as a community, what do you think we're going to be talking about next year's summit? What are going to be the things that are on

the industry's mind and on the provider's mind? I think this notion of how the AI is going to scale and become efficient and sustainable, it still needs to go on. We were touching the surface. I think that's going to still take a lot of time and momentum and a lot of creativity to resolve these far-reaching problems of scale, power, cooling, sustainability aspects of it, all the way from, let's say, from building a new infrastructure and or augmenting the current infrastructure that is out there from buildings to everything else that is needed to build to make it work. Those are the things I don't think it's going to slow down.

I think we still have a year to really understand how this is going to go. But what I believe, maybe I'm wrong, I'm ahead of it, but I believe that maybe after mid-year, next year, quantum technology is going to take some stage. We're nibbling at it right now. OCP is nibbling at it. But I think that is going to be the next frontier, in my humble opinion. I love that prediction, and I can't wait for it. I think it's going to be really exciting to see.

One final question for you, George. I know that there are so many different ways to get involved in this community. What is a great way for somebody who's listening online to get started if they are not a member of SCP today? I think the best way to do is we foster collaboration. And because we foster collaboration and it says that if you come, you put in, you will get something out of it. We are a very simple organization, very open. You have to come in, you volunteer. If you have a problem to solve and you volunteer, we have, like I said, just imagine 140 current projects.

If you take a snapshot, 140 of them going and all of them being done by volunteers. But why they come in? They come in to volunteer because they know we bring the creative minds of the industry together. And you lead that, let's say, work group. You will get so much out of it for your own company's benefit, your own personal benefit, whatever your passion is that you are driving from a technology end of it. And at the end, when it's converges, come together as a building block, your company benefits from it. And that becomes, let's say, modularized.

I don't want to call it standard, but modularized common way of approaching things with the right interfaces. And OCP is a very blind environment that we provide this platform for people to come in and grow their business accordingly. The other thing that they can benefit from is that our marketplace. I would like to emphasize that before becoming the CEO of OCP, I was driving open networking company. The way I personally benefited and my company benefited that I was driving from nothing to very successful company was really partnering with OCP and Yep. And using OCP's value proposition to drive my success and drive my message and using their platform in open environment, especially in our marketplace, to showcase my products. Sure.

And with that, I was able to be discovered by hyperscalers that say Meta, and the rest is history. As an example, if people are coming in, they can really utilize this platform very effectively and we're here to help them. That's fantastic. Thank you so much. I know how busy this week is for you.

I really appreciate the time as well, Alison. Thank you. Thanks for joining the Tech Arena. Subscribe and engage at our website, thetecharena.net. All content is copyright by the Tech Arena. Subscribe and engage at our website, thetecharena.net. All content is copyright by the Tech Arena.