BEIJING, June 30, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The OCP China Day,
co-sponsored by the OCP Foundation and OCP platinum member Inspur,
kicked off in Beijing on
June 25. The event attracted nearly
1,000 engineers and operators in the data center ecosystem. Senior
technical experts from Facebook, LinkedIn, Intel, Microsoft, Baidu,
Tencent, Alibaba, Nokia, China
Mobile, and Inspur had keynotes sharing the progress of standards
development in frontier areas such as next-generation rack-scale
servers, edge computing, AI, and open networks.
The OCP Foundation, initiated by Facebook in 2011, has more than
200 board members including Google, Microsoft, Intel, and IBM, and
more than 7,000 enterprises have participated in community
activities. In 2018, the purchase value of non-board members of OCP
grew over 120% to reach US$2.56
billion, and the figure is expected to exceed US$10.7 billion by 2022.
Open Rack 3.0, the next-generation open rack-scale server
standard
At the event, Steve Mills, OCP
rack and power project team leader, offered a systematic
introduction of the latest Open Rack 3.0 rack-scale server
specifications. Open Rack is the most influential standard project
in the OCP community. Currently, Open Rack 2.0 is widely used by
Internet companies and telecom operators, but it runs into physical
limitations in power supply and heat dissipation that are hard to
tackle to further improve performance density. OCP developed Open
Rack 3.0 to address this. Compared with its predecessor, Open Rack
3.0 incorporates a fluid cooling feature, elevates the rack-scale
power to 15-33KW and adds support for the 48V DC power supply,
further enhancing energy efficiency. In addition, the rack height
is increased from 41OU to 44OU, improving space utilization. The
internal structure is also adjusted to reserve space for extension
of I/O, storage and other standalone features. The standard is
awaiting approval and not yet released.
Integration of edge and open computing
In the 5G era, operators will build business platforms on the
network edge in proximity to users, and decentralize key business
applications to the network edge to reduce bandwidth and delay loss
caused by network transmission and multi-level forwarding.
The OCP community has established an Open Edge Technical
Subgroup in the Telecom Project Group, with the hope of developing
a set of open standards for hardware facilities such as edge
computing servers. Nokia, a leader of the subgroup, has contributed
the Open Edge Chassis Specification v1.2 standard. Tomi Männikkö,
head of Nokia's Hardware Architecture Department, said in his
speech at the event that the basic deployment unit defined in this
standard is a 3U chassis with a width of 19 inches and a depth of
430mm, which supports 1U and 2U expansion nodes with half width,
1/4 width, and full width. With a maximum supply power of 2000W,
the chassis supports both AC and DC power supply modes and is
compatible with various deployment environments such as edge
computing and remote edge computing.
Inspur also showcased two edge computing servers, both 2U
two-socket servers with a depth of 430mm. With a wide temperature
and humidity range and high corrosion resistance, they support GPU
and NVM-e and have undergone NUMA balance optimization for telecom
applications.
OAI bridges heterogeneous acceleration to application
The boom of AI has boosted the development of heterogeneous
acceleration solutions for applications such as deep learning,
machine learning, and high-performance computing. Accelerator
hardware systems pose high technical challenges and design
complexity – it usually takes 6 to 12 months to integrate
accelerators into the system. The long development cycle hinders
the rapid adoption of new AI accelerators.
Different heterogeneous solutions share the same requirements,
including supply/cooling, resilience, availability, manageability,
internal I/O interaction, and external scalable I/O links. The OCP
community established the OAI (Open Accelerator Infrastructure)
team under the server project team to develop the OAM (OCP
Accelerator Module) specifications which serve to standardize
accelerator modules, streamline AI infrastructure designs, and
shorten hardware design cycles. According to the OAI project lead,
it is fast and easy for an enterprise to develop an AI solution,
but difficult to develop an ecosystem independently, in which case
joining OCP would be a good choice.
Tencent and Inspur announced at
the event their joint contribution of the T-Flex 2.0 specification
to the OCP community. The specification not only focuses on the
specification design of heterogeneous acceleration, but is also
based on the I/O pooling technology to achieve modular iteration
and flexible combination of servers through decoupling and
restructuring of different server modules. Users can implement
various application solutions such as heterogeneous acceleration,
cold storage, and HPC clusters based on the
specification.
Unified open management architecture for data centers
OCP is building the next-generation data center management
architecture, and the mission of the community's Open Firmware
project team is to develop agile, open, and standard firmware
design specifications to meet the development needs of the
next-generation cloud computing infrastructure. The project team is
developing open-source kits that include only the most basic
platform code to identify white-box hardware, while using Intel®
FSP to develop a white-box hardware system that is deployable and
bootable to shape an Open Firmware ecosystem integrating both
software and hardware.
OpenRMC, another project team in the community, is working on
the integration of OpenBMC and Redfish – a standard slated to
replace IPMI for hardware management – to create a uniform
framework for next-generation data center management. Led by
Inspur, the OpenBMC project represents the Linux community's aim to
address the standard inconsistency between closed-source BMC and
related software packages. The OpenRMC project hopes to solve such
issues as interoperability between two different standards, and
forge new norms that advance the development of next-generation
data center management technologies and the industry at large.
Collaborations flourish between different open
communities
Boosted by the projects such as OpenRMC and Open Firmware, OCP
has been increasingly involved in cooperation with Linux,
OpenStack, and DMTF. Beyond that, OCP also sees expanding
collaboration with China's ODCC
open computing community.
The convergence of various open computing communities is picking
up speed. In 2014, Microsoft joined the OCP community, and OCS and
Olympus became the standards of the OCP community. In 2018,
LinkedIn joined OCP and the Open19 standard won recognition across
the community. China's ODCC
initiative continues its independent development, but with more
extensive and in-depth collaborations with OCP, driving the fusion
of the two organizations.
View original
content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ocp-china-day-integrates-ai-edge-computing-and-5g-topics-with-open-computing-300878311.html
SOURCE Inspur Electronic Information Industry Co., Ltd