Open Compute Project Foundation Announces the OCP Future Technologies Initiative

Formal Project will bring the academic, research and entrepreneurial communities to their open source Community work streams.
 

Today the Open Compute Project Foundation (OCP) announces the formation of the OCP Future Technologies Initiative, a formal project within the Foundation whose mission is to build a future-focused Community within OCP to serve as forward-looking funnel for 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. (See below for their biographies)

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. 

About OCP:
The Open Compute Project Foundation (OCP) was initiated in 2011 with a mission to apply the benefits of open source and open collaboration to hardware and rapidly increase the pace of innovation in, near and around the data center’s networking equipment, general purpose and GPU servers, storage devices and appliances, and scalable rack designs. OCP’s collaboration model is being applied beyond the data center, helping to advance the telecom industry & EDGE infrastructure.  
 

Manoj Wadekar: Facebook, Storage Hardware Architect

Manoj brings 29+ years in Server, Storage, and Networking industry experience to the role. His current focus for Facebook is to identify ambiguous problems for hyper-scale storage infrastructure, and drive innovative solutions. His specialties include transforming hyper-scale infrastructure to drive performance and efficiency. Technology Research and Innovation. Product and Technology Strategy. Product Roadmaps. Business cases. High-level architecture, and IP development. Cross-industry initiatives and collaborations. Manoj holds a Bachelor's Degree in the Electronics and Telecommunications from Walchand College of Engineering and an M. Tech in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur.


Murugasamy (Sammy) Nachimuthu: Intel Corporation, Sr. Principal Engineer

Sammy joined Intel in 1995, and has played a key role in architecture development of Rack Scale Design (RSD), Intel® Optane™ DC Persistent Memory, UEFI, SAL, DIG64, ACPI, Redfish; PCIe, Memory and CPU hot plug and RAS. Sammy led BIOS/UEFI/Firmware implementation of various Intel® Xeon® and Intel® Itanium® server platforms. Sammy holds 60 patents. Sammy graduated B.E in Electrical and Electronics Engineer and M.E in Computer Science from PSG College of Technology, Coimbatore, India.