Theme

The event theme for OCP Canada Tech Day, From Ideas to Impact, encapsulates the OCP Community’s transformative journey that drives openness, efficiency, sustainability, scalability and growth in the data center industry. The theme reflects OCP’s commitment to fostering innovation that transcends theoretical discussions and manifests into real-world complete solutions. As the pace of technological evolution accelerates and development cycles shorten, our industry is forced to rapidly respond to emerging trends and needs from cloud to the edge.

The increasing complexity and demand of high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) applications, has created a critical need for transformative innovations to allow for responsibly deploying AI/HPC from cloud to edge. We are at an inflection point in the data center industry driven by investments in high-density computational infrastructure for AI, for large training clusters and distributed inference clusters at the edge.

From a technology perspective, we see the need to rethink data center IT equipment, facilities and silicon supply chains. Previous inflection points moving from closed proprietary stacks to open ecosystems that drove the cloud era are still an important force and will play an important role in shaping the next wave of data center development. Important technology advancements in the data center delivering large-scale AI clusters for training include:

1. chiplet technology and associated advanced packaging,
2. new subsystems such as liquid cooling, power distribution, DC facilities Design, networking, storage, and server architectures, and
3. systems management. Placing AI inference at the edge will require smaller scale but still high-performance computational equipment and high-speed low-latency optical communication networks to tie everything together.

We also must not ignore the hard fact that we must innovate to produce a new generation of IT equipment and data center facilities that are much less impactful to the environment. At OCP the community has taken the challenge to solve some of the most critical technical issues around sustainability. There are many dimensions to the sustainability problem:the critical dimensions of power, water consumption and carbon production must be tackled as soon as possible.

In planning the OCP Canada Tech Day, the OCP will bring together Canadian technical and business leadership along with the OCP Community to discuss and share progress and ideas important to advancing data center technologies and markets. OCP Canada Tech Day is intended to showcase the latest innovations and technical advancements from around the world, featuring talks from experts researching and designing the next generation of data center and edge computing equipment followed by two afternoon breakout sessions covering:

1. Responsibly deploying next-generation, open AI/HPC clusters
2. Open ecosystems for mobile network hardware platforms