It is hard to imagine, but OCP’s Regional Summit is coming up in just 2 weeks. Our last Regional Summit in Europe was in 2019 before the covid19 pandemic, and I’ve been eager ever since joining the board to connect with our European leaders to hear their perspectives, and specific challenges of running data centers and building servers in the European market.
As for every OCP event, I like to write my own “unofficial” guide on what I’m most excited about, and where you’ll find me if you are there. As always, I want to meet with you, so please do reach out!
So, let’s start with Day 1:
- We will start with Keynotes on the morning of the 19th, and it is interesting to see the regional flavor of this event. At the Global Summit the topics were very much centered on AI (including connectivity for workloads that cannot be encompassed on single nodes), Security, and Sustainability. Here in Europe Sustainability is taking center stage (for Silicon providers, and Cloud companies), and Ethernet for AI/ML and HPC, but we are also seeing discussions about the role and future Open Source and Open Empowerment, standardization of Edge Computing (which is going to be fascinating since I can think of nothing less standardized today), and Quantum Computing.
- In the afternoon we will transition into several engineering workshops (and yes, as wonderful as the keynotes are, THESE are the heart of the conference). I’ll be excited to see the SONiC sessions from the vibrant European community (Criteo, STORDIS, Deutsche Telekom, Broadcom, Weaveworks, and Credo), and new OCP-Ready systems and contributions from Mitac, Inspur, HPE, Giga Computing, Murata, and 9elements.
- The other track occurring during the engineering sessions is the Future Technologies Symposium, which once again has a very different regional flavor than FTS at the Global Summit. We are seeing sessions on Quantum computing, Neuromorphic computing, AI/HPC techniques for data center energy optimization, temperature and location impact on overall IT efficiency, heat reuse techniques, and more.
That evening we will have a welcome reception, and no my band is not playing, but we will have an incredible time connecting in beautiful Prague.
Day 2 will bring additional sessions on system management, modularity, and security as well as expanding on the key networking and sustainability activities. Here are the ones I’m so excited about:
- DC-SCM with OpenBMC compliance suite (I find this personally relevant), TEE-agnostic attestation research, fault management, leveraging ChatGPT for SSD development, scope 3 emissions standards proposals, Caliptra updates, OSF, attestation with Redfish, CXL memory expansion, and immersion (from fluids that are more sustainable to the system designs and reuse methodologies).
- There will also be updates on chiplets, a session on “SONiC Lite” (which I think is so critical–most of us want to start with a low risk SONiC use case, but if SONiC needs significant memory to run, we will be greatly impacted on being able to leverage it for these lower risk scenarios: console/management switches), and precision time protocol options, which I also think is such an important project for standardization and improved global network management.
Fundamentally our European community is thinking about the future of innovation from the silicon to systems, software, system-level firmware, management, and so much more. I really look forward to learning from everyone and meeting our local leaders and experts.