A Preview of the 2019 OCP Regional Summit Agenda!

The OCP Regional summit will offer 7 technical tracks and more than 80 presentations this year. The full agenda is now available here and below I share some insights into the workshops! 

 

At the Global summit in March, the Foundation announced two new sub-projects:  Open Domain Specific Architecture (ODSA) & the Open Accelerator Module(OAM). A dedicated track on ODSA and Accelerator Infrastructure will highlight the significant progress both projects are making to deliver accelerator chips and the infrastructure to deploy the silicon. ODSA is not only developing specs and tools to integrate multi-party chipsets onto SOC’s, they will deliver the first prototype as early as this year.

 

Since the Global summit, the OAM project has expanded in scope to now address power/cooling, robustness, serviceability, configuration, programming, management and debug, as well as inter-module communication to scale up and input/output bandwidth to scale out. Open infrastructure is needed to intercept rapid innovation in artificial intelligence. This track is where open accelerator infrastructure meets open artificial intelligence.

 

OpenEDGE is a new project and a new track for Amsterdam. An open hardware platform is already available and we will hear from a variety of suppliers that plan to support this platform, including a discussion on how the ARM architecture is being enabled for OCP OpenEdge.

 

The Data Center Facilities track is loaded with new ideas and case studies on how OCP principles are reshaping the facility with modularity and energy conservation. Colo facilities in Europe are receiving the OCP Ready™ recognition.  For anyone operating a colo, this track is a ‘must’ for you.  

 

In Amsterdam last year the Foundation launched the Advanced Cooling Solutions project, which covers immersion, cold plate and door heat exchangers (HEx). All three options will be discussed along with the harmonization efforts necessary to make these solutions easier to adopt and deploy. Updates to the OpenRack standard and compatible power systems, including a power module interoperability proposal, are also being discussed in this track.   

 

The Open Systems Firmware project will have a full lineup of speakers to share the progress they are making to achieve open source solutions for server initialization. Hear from ARM on the server firmware standard SBBR and from Intel on how to create BIOS using Intel® Firmware Support Package (FSP). David Hendricks from Facebook will walk us through the process of downloading the necessary firmware ingredients and building a firmware image that can boot an OCP system. This track will also cover the OpenRMC progress and its collateral targeting the OpenEDGE platform as the initial platform.

 

Extraordinary progress has been made to secure operating system and application security. However, if the underlying hardware platform is compromised, the operating system and applications are rendered vulnerable.  A track on security will discuss hardware level security and the supply chain that delivers it.  

 

We are excited about this event and look forward to seeing you in Amsterdam!

 

Learn more about the event, register and explore sponsorship and exhibit opportunities here: https://www.opencompute.org/summit/regional-summit