The Open Compute Project Foundation (OCP) has selected Erik Riedel as it’s OCP Future Technologies Initiative (FTI) Chair. Dr. Riedel will serve a two-year team, and succeeds Allan Smith, who is the founding Chair and has served since its inception in 2020.
In 2019, the Foundation initiated the OCP Future Technologies Symposium (FTS), 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 to 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.
Following on the success of the Symposium, the OCP Future Technologies Initiative was launched in 2020. The FTI is a formal effort within the OCP Foundation whose mission is to build a future-focused community within OCP to serve as a forward-looking funnel for ideas and technologies three-to-five years, or further, into the future. The FTI serves to continually build pipelines of talent and ideas focused on next/future-generation or horizon problem-sets facing the OCP Community and industry.
“Allan Smith initiated the Future Technologies Symposium with the vision to bring more future-focused technologies into the OCP Community, including their representative communities of researchers and academia, as well as startups and investors. His vision has blossomed to include the Future Technologies Initiative with multiple workstreams on the cutting edge of technology, and the Foundation will forever be grateful for this historic contribution,” stated Dirk Van Slyke, Chief Marketing Officer for the OCP Foundation.
Erik Riedel, PhD has more than 20 years experience designing & building scale-out computing technology and teams, and currently works on open hardware and data center sustainability as Chief Engineering Officer for Flax Computing, innovating to pragmatically reduce the carbon footprint of large-scale computing worldwide. He previously served as Senior Vice President of Engineering for ITRenew’s circular data center initiatives, including the Sesame product line (acquired by Iron Mountain).
Prior to joining ITRenew, he led multiple infrastructure engineering organizations at Dell and EMC where he and his teams built several generations of market-leading scalable storage products with over $2b of deployed systems and 1000s of worldwide customers in all industry
verticals. Over the past twenty years he has watched new technologies create cultural and organizational change. He has helped create alliances and partnerships across the industry in open source and standards activities, including long-time participation in the Linux Foundation, Kubernetes and the Open Compute Project communities. He also served for many years on the SNIA Technical Council and led industry-wide efforts in object and green storage. He held research, innovation, and engineering leadership positions at Seagate Research and HP Labs and holds a PhD in Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.
The FTI currently has three active workstreams, while also remaining open to new opportunities that are relevant to the data center industry, including:
- AI HW-SW Design Collaboration
- Data Centric Computing
- Short Reach Optical Interconnect (launching later this quarter)
Erik will begin his duties immediately, and you can meet him personally at the upcoming OCP EMEA Regional Summit, in Lisbon, Portugal in April.