The Open Compute Project Foundation (OCP) has announced the formation of the OCP Future Technologies Initiative, a formal project to build a future-focused Community within OCP to serve as a platform to develop ideas and technologies three-to-five years into the future.
In 2019, the Foundation initiated the OCP Future Technologies Symposium, a bi-annual event that features a call for posters, and brings together academia, the technology industry, startups, venture capital and analyst firms to solve future challenges facing the industry, and accelerate productization through partnerships and open source R&D. All submissions are featured and the winners are announced at the Summit events OCP holds each year.
At the end of 2020, the Symposium and Foundation leaders decided it was time to organize a regular interface with the OCP Community and the research industry to better focus their continued efforts and to initiate funding and commercialization of these early stage innovations. Focused on building pipelines of talent to work on specific problems, the OCP Future Technologies Initiative will ultimately hand off promising efforts to OCP Projects, with the ultimate goal of commercialization.
The Foundation also announced that the Initiative will focus on three specific technical areas, in alignment with the OCP Foundation Incubation Committee leaders in their Technology Roadmap. They will be:
- Software Defined Memory
- Cloud Service Model
- AI HW-SW Design Collaboration
- Additional R&D Opportunities area identified by the Community
Each focus area will be led by an industry veteran; Manoj Wadekar, Storage Hardware Architect at Facebook will lead the Software Defined Memory group and Murugasamy (Sammy) Nachimuthu, a lead cloud solutions architect and Sr. Principal Engineer at Intel Corporation, will lead the Cloud Service Model group. There is a search underway for a leader of the AI HW-SW Co-Design group.
The OCP Future Technologies Symposium effort has been successfully led by Chair Allan Smith, currently the Lab Manager for Area 404, Facebook’s hardware prototyping laboratory, and Lesya Dymyd, a strategic innovation engineer at 2CRSi, serving as the Symposium Program Chair. Both will continue in their volunteer leadership roles for both the Symposium and the Initiative.
There are several ways to get involved in the OCP Future Technologies Initiative:
- Join the mailing list to receive updates: https://ocp-all.groups.io/g/Future-Technologies-Initiative
- Join the mailing list of each project
- Software Defined Memory: https://ocp-all.groups.io/g/Software-Defined-Memory
- Cloud Service Model: https://ocp-all.groups.io/g/Cloud-Service-Model
- AI HW-SW Design Collaboration: https://ocp-all.groups.io/g/AI-HW-SW-CoDesign
- Join the conversation in the LinkedIn Group: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/12464540/
- Connect with the FTI team and the community, and contribute!
- Find the latest FTI information on the wiki: https://www.opencompute.org/wiki/OCP_Future_Technologies_Initiative
The next OCP Future Technologies Symposium will be held as a Day 0 event prior to the start of the 2021 OCP Global Summit to be held in November, and will be a Hybrid event – meaning it will be in-person at the San Jose Convention Center, in San Jose, CA, and will also allow for virtual attendance and participation.
