Future Technologies Initiative

The OCP Future Technologies Initiative (FTI) is a formal effort within the Foundation to build a future-focused Community within OCP, serving as a forward-looking funnel for ideas and technologies two-to-five years out. FTI brings academia, industry researchers, startups, venture capital, and analyst firms into OCP to solve future industry challenges and accelerate productization. Its expert-led workstreams build pipelines of talent on specific problems and ultimately hand promising efforts off to OCP Projects, with the goal of commercialization.

Get involved

Project Leads

Boniface Yogendran

Subscribe to mailing list

About This Project

The OCP Future Technologies Initiative (FTI) is a formal effort 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.

Resources

The OCP Future Technologies Initiative is 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.

Workstreams

The Future Technologies Initiative will focus on specific technical areas, in alignment with the OCP Foundation Steering Committee and Foundation leadership.

Each focus area will be led by an expert in the field, and will call on volunteers and expertise from a range of member companies, academia, and related standard bodies. Current FTI workstreams include:

Jason Molgaard, Storage Device Architecture at Solidigm, Technical Chair of the Data Centric Computing workstream.
Bobby Lu, Prinical Engineer at Lightelligence, and Ron Swartzentruber, Director of Engineering at AMD, will lead the Short Reach Optical Interconnect workstream.
Boniface Yogendran, CD, PEng, and Jonathan Burnett, Deputy Director of Research at NQCC will lead the Data Center Integration of Quantum Information Infrastructure workstream.
Kyle McCrindle, CTO at Denvr Dataworks; Jonmichael (JM) Hands, CEO at FarmGPU; and Yann-Guirec Manac’h, Office of CTO at Scaleway, will lead the Scaling AI Clusters at Neoclouds workstream.
Shrikanth Venkateshappa, Global Business Development Data Center IT Power at Rittal, and Peter Abrell, Project Engineer at VISION ELECTRIC Super Conductors, will lead the High-temperature Superconducting Power Infrastructure workstream.

We would like to thank Murugasamy (Sammy) Nachimuthu, lead cloud solutions architect and Senior Principal Engineer at Intel Corporation, who successfully led the Cloud Service Model workstream to graduation from FTI, now within the Hardware Management Project. Likewise, we thank Weifeng Zhang, Corporate VP, Head of Labs at Lenovo Research, who served as Technical Chair of the AI HW-SW Design workstream which also graduated to a Subproject under the Server OCP Project.

This marks the third successful FTI workstream transition, after the initial transition of the Software Defined Memory workstream to create a new OCP Subproject, now called Composable Memory Systems.

Past FTI Events

2021 Future Technologies Initiative Kickoff Webinar

– Video – Slides

Future Technologies Initiative calendar

Sub-Projects

Data Center Integration of Quantum Information Infrastructure

Data Center Integration of Quantum Information Infrastructure is a workstream of the OCP Future Technologies Initiative. Its vision is a future where quantum information technologies are seamlessly integrated, efficiently managed, and sustainably scaled within open, general-purpose data centers. The mission is to accelerate adoption of diverse quantum technologies in hyperscale and enterprise data centers by defining open, common, and sustainable infrastructure specifications, interfaces, and best practices under the OCP framework. Goals cover open specifications for quantum hardware integration, OCP-compatible quantum infrastructure, hybrid quantum-classical orchestration, and sustainable deployments. The workstream addresses horizontal integration, not device physics, and plans a three-part white paper series plus an OCP Ready site layout checklist.

Data Centric Computing

Data Centric Computing is a workstream of the OCP Future Technologies Initiative. It responds to the limits of CPU-centric computing as Dennard scaling and Moore's Law reach their end, exploring technologies that place computation where data lives rather than moving all data to the CPU. The shift is driven by power-efficient data handling and bandwidth limits, building on domain-specific accelerators such as ASICs and FPGAs. Scope covers horizontal integration of computational storage, in-memory processing, near-memory processing, and data processing units. Three key areas guide the work: a common computing interface, resource discovery and management, and sustainable scaled computing, fostering a flexible, integrated data-centric ecosystem.

High-temperature Superconducting Power Infrastructure

AI data centers are entering a new phase of electrical infrastructure demand. As accelerator rack power increases toward hundreds of kilowatts and potentially megawatt-class deployments, conventional power-distribution systems may face growing challenges in current density, space, losses, heat, material usage, protection, and maintainability.

Scaling AI Clusters at Neoclouds

Scaling AI Clusters at Neoclouds is a workstream of the OCP Future Technologies Initiative that unites industry leaders, researchers, and practitioners in an open forum around the challenges of scaling AI infrastructure for neoclouds offering xPU IaaS/PaaS. Goals include knowledge sharing, interoperability across scales, energy efficiency and sourcing strategies, and open standards for AI infrastructure modularity. The group documents neocloud-specific challenges - getting facilities, electrons, hardware, and customers - and maps each to OCP work areas such as OCP Ready for AI and DCF. Rather than writing specifications itself, the workstream coordinates work through OCP Projects and Strategic Initiatives, particularly Open Systems for AI and Open Cluster Designs for AI.

Short Reach Optical Interconnect

Short Reach Optical Interconnect (SROI) is a workstream of the OCP Future Technologies Initiative. Its mission is to guide the industry on how short-reach optics can improve processor-to-processor and processor-to-memory bandwidth by clearly defining the requirements and metrics for optical compute I/O. The workstream defines applications and use cases for optical I/O, finds the benchmark for each, and documents the key issues to resolve. It encourages technical innovation by defining the relevant parameters and will produce an OCP requirements document.