In The Arena by TechArena - OCP Summit Recap: Innovation, Collaboration & Future Focus

Episode Date: November 1, 2024

OCP’s Rob Coyle shares insights on AI, cooling innovations, and open hardware’s role in transforming data centers as the industry accelerates toward scalable, sustainable infrastructure.

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 as part of our recap of the OCP Summit, I'm so glad to be here with Rob Coyle from the OCP Foundation. Welcome to the program, Rob. How are you doing? Thanks, Alison. Great. So, Rob, you are driving all sorts of technical programs with the OCP community. Can you give us just a start point on your role

and how it relates to the broader purview of what OCP is driving in the marketplace? Yeah, of course. For me personally, I've been involved in the Open Compute Project for the better part of seven years now, working with two member companies. And we've got those member companies working on our contribution process. And so starting two years ago, I joined the foundation full time. And that is really my focus. Specifications, best practices, design files, things like that, that get contributed to the Open Compute Project is what I focus on. Now, obviously, the technical programs intersect a lot of different technologies and a lot of different work groups within the foundation. Can you talk a little bit about how you are prioritizing those technologies and those intercept points?

It's really all community driven. Our role is to be the framework that supports the community. So if the community has a lot of energy and interest around specific problems and solutions, then that's really where my time gets spent. A lot of our projects are vertical as far as scope and components, but so many of the more recent ones are horizontal where like sustainability reaches across all of our projects. Today, we're seeing a lot more interaction between our projects related to issues like cooling methodology, sustainability, the boom of AI. It's touching more than just individual components at this point.

Now, we just came out of a fantastic summit. It was groundbreaking in terms of the scope and scale and really just the energy of the event. And I think it just underscores the speed of innovation that's happening in the industry with the advent of AI and the hyperscalers chasing that technology. What innovations were discussed at the show that reflect the spirit of open hardware best to you? And what do you think will be most impactful to the market in terms of announcements and technologies that were featured at the show? And which ones do you think really are going to move from ideas into massive deployments? Yeah, I mean, as you touched on from our event, the energy was high. I've sensed it the same way I think most people who attended did. It's the biggest summit we've ever had. And our theme this year was from ideas to impact. So it's

really right on point to this discussion. The things that jump out the most to me that really are impactful to the market is we saw a shift from last year and maybe even the year before around liquid cooling and hardware that needs to be adopted for AI workloads. And those we saw live and in person at the show. We saw major announcements from Meta and NVIDIA and Google on issues around their hardware infrastructure for AI, including rack technology. On the expo hall floor, cooling vendors from Coldplate to Immersion to Two Phase. These are real items that are hitting the market today. And just 18 months ago, we were still on paper or in proof of concept stage for a lot of these things. But we see a lot of our membership and newcomers to OCP leveraging what OCP has been doing for a really long time and

being able to take ideas and get them to market and innovate really fast. So taking technology like Open Rack version three that's been around for some time and adopting it to AI was a much quicker way of getting these AI systems available to the market and available to more people and more vendors than ever before. One question that I had as a follow-up to that is we talked to Fuchs at the show and they were talking about their dielectric and how they went through the process with OCP to become a certified dielectric for the industry. Tell me about why those types of efforts are so important as we see something like liquid cooling transition into the data center

and start scaling based on greater power densities and the need for a move from air to liquid. From air to liquid, we're really at scale. We're really at the frontier as far as technology. There's not standard organizations that are up to the speed of the demands today. So you still need standardization, but we don't have standards organizations really creating that wave for us. We have the market and the people participating in it deciding that. So through collaborative efforts like Fuchs was part of, have created guidelines and best practices and specifications that vendors

and multiple people within the ecosystem can standardize around. And they can do that very quickly. We talked to Amber Huffman in an interview, and she talked about the rack configuration that you mentioned and brought up this concept of standardize around 80% and then allow for differentiation as solutions hit the market. Why do you think that's such an important evolution of thought in terms of how the industry is working together on open hardware standardization? There's lots of things that the biggest buyers in the industry have just agreed are not competitive advantages. There are certain elements of the rack that are just bent sheet metal. They have

to serve the purpose and they have to meet weight load requirements and all these things, but it's the same requirement no matter whose data center you're in. So it can't be different. There are different approaches to cooling methodology or how they've laid out their network architecture and how they're going to use these racks and what type of environments they're going to use them in that is different from end user to end user. And they need that freedom to custom tailor that solution to exactly what they're doing, because there are some elements of the data center that are the same for everybody, but there's some pieces that still are not, and they need that freedom.

Now, we're looking at the second half of the decade coming at us just in a couple of months. When you look forward and you think about the next five years, where do you think OCP will be focused to address the emerging data center requirements? We're moving at such a fast pace that it's hard to predict, but I'd love to get your early thoughts. If you asked me this question two years ago, I think I'd probably give you a very predictable answer of more and steadily and that. But the amount of change we've seen over the last 18 months or a year has just been faster than most people have expected. It is nice to see that the demand for innovation and the market really coming forward to work together is increasing in popularity. From our third-party commission studies, we're seeing that open hardware is a growing part of the industry. And I'm thankful to be part of an organization that helps lead that. So I think we're going to see more advancement

specifics on cooling. I think we're going to see all of the above as far as cooling. I think you'll see immersion. I think you'll see cold plate. You'll see single phase and two phase. I think you'll see advancements in networking at a faster rate than ever before. But the one thing that will be consistent is you're going to need more people coming together and you're going to need bigger communities with more stakeholders to voice the best way forward in developing the solutions.

We're going system-wide and data center-wide, not just server or component level at this stage. That's very cool. And it's going to be so cool to follow this over the next few years, given how every element of the computing platform, every element of the data center infrastructure seems to be in turbo mode in terms of rate of innovation right now. Now, you've spent a lot of time in industry.

You talked about this earlier in the podcast. You've been involved in OCP for years before actually joining the foundation. What was it like to make the transition and sit in that foundation seat, given your extensive history of working for different companies that were engaging in OCP? Some things were as expected. I've made friends with members of the foundation team for years prior. I still get the opportunity to interact with my friends in the industry and coworkers. And, you know, it's nice to see familiar faces and work in an environment from that regard. Being on the foundation side is interesting, though I have

my personal takes on technology and ways of doing things. The foundation's responsibility is really just the framework and service of the community. And so really focused on the process and creating a safe environment where people can share IP and develop from that collaboration is a different area. And so staying in my focus and taking my individual technologist hat off and focus on serving the industry was a bit of a shift. But I get to learn so much every day from areas of the industry that I never previously had the opportunity to interact with. And it's just been really great. Now, Rob, I'm sure given the amount of attention OCP is getting right now, that this podcast will get a lot of attention too. Thank you so much for sharing your insights today. Where can folks engage with you to continue the conversation or get involved with the foundation? Yeah, we're all over the social media platforms that are typical, but the best place to get the

information is at opencompute.org. And please browse the website. You do not have to be a member of the Open Compute Project to get anything from the OCP website. You just mentioned the Global Summit. We have posted all the sessions, all the keynotes, the slides are there. You can download those for free forever. There's no paywall. We're not going to ask for your information, nothing like that. So get on the website, start consuming. And if you see a place where you have questions

or you might want to start contributing, please reach out to us. Thank you so much, Rob. It's been awesome to talk to you. This is a great year for OCP. I can't wait for 2025. Me neither. Thank you so much.

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