The Open Compute Project (OCP) is a non-profit organization founded by Facebook in 2011, two years after Facebook began revolutionizing its data center design. Facebook needed a larger, more efficient data center as they grew in popularity. They built a data center from the ground up, improving the design and hardware and reducing the overall cost. In 2011, they opened the project to other organizations and created the Open Compute Project Foundation, sharing detailed information on their data center plans, designs, and measurements with anyone who was interested.
The OCP believes that open collaboration is the best way to promote creativity and innovation. As the need for bigger and better data centers increases, the OCP wants the data center design process to be efficient and economical. They have multiple ongoing projects that are listed on their website and broken down into subcategories, such as an advanced cooling facility (just one segment of their data center facility project). The OCP expects data center hardware to meet the needs of data center innovation accordingly as data centers continue to grow.
Most recently, OCP procedures are being implemented in artificial intelligence development as well. Intel has been developing AI technology alongside the Open Compute Project. Over the past year and a half, the OCP has also been working on an Open Accelerator Infrastructure, which helps AI technology to integrate with data center networks more quickly.
