The Open Compute Project

https://www.opencompute.org/about

by greenSunglass • 2 years ago

38 8 2 years ago

Good stuff is happening here, such as security https://www.opencompute.org/wiki/Security and open source https://www.opencompute.org/projects/open-system-firmware

jauntywundrkind• 2 years ago

The value proposition has never quite gotten clear. There's some places where things have gotten better, with opennic and various firmware expectations. The chassis and power supply specifications are pretty generally usable.

But in terms of actual computing hardware? Hell no. Meta and others keep releasing system designs every year or so, but they're deeply abstract designs. None of the hard engineering work is provided; it's largely abstract requirements that do practically nothing to ease system design. The hard work of building a motherboard still has to be done de-novo; it's just extra difficult for it has to meet difficult constraints too.

I still love and respect OCP. The Evenstar work contributed, for example, represents a very high flying state of the art cellular system that could should & ought totally revamp a large chunk of what we do, if we had any sense, but the conservative large-industry demand side isn't picking up this possibility. Theres so much interest & possibility in so many places. But almost never is the real good stuff given away or really detailed. Google giving away 75% of the work for a extreme efficiency DC-DC converter, STC (switched tank converter), is the best OpenCompute seems to be able to deliver, yet requires custom systems to use. More typically they just specify demands & provide no path & no help to getting there: we want this, build it, and in that case the competition remains deeply proprietary & guards it's offerings closely.

wmf2• 2 years ago

The hard work of building a motherboard still has to be done de-novo...

I think the idea is that you contact the same ODM that Meta is using and they reuse the existing design. Of course they usually don't tell you which ODM that is so you have to guess. Overall the selective openness is still pretty annoying.

jabl2• 2 years ago

The chassis [snip] specifications are pretty generally usable.

IMHO it's a bit stupid they made the OCP chassis/rack spec incompatible with the standard EIA 19" rack (Yes, there's the Open19 stuff etc., but talking about the "main" OCP racks here). If you're going to break with the established standard, at least make something substantially different with scope for significant improvement. As it is, the OCP rack design is just subtly different from the 19" to be annoying but doesn't bring any huge improvements, fracturing the market for very little benefit.

wmf2• 2 years ago

Open Rack has totally different power distribution than industry-standard racks and it uses OUs instead of Us. How much more difference do you want?

subharmonicon• 2 years ago

Microscaling formats for machine learning: https://www.opencompute.org/documents/ocp-microscaling-forma...

ipsum2• 2 years ago

This is a big deal for increasing performance past fp8. We'll see Nvidia/AMD/Intel etc adopt this in their products in the next year.

The Open Compute Project

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