Open Compute taps IOWN to design distributed datacenter

"But edge AI won't stand alone, so as OCP points out in its announcement, centralized datacenters will need to connect with geographically distributed resources in regional data centers, colocation facilities, telcos, private datacenters, factories, and even individual offices. Communication between those facilities will need to be fast, again to prevent high latency. The links OCP envisages also have the potential to create huge amounts of data and network traffic."

"The main agenda item for the two organizations is creating "a roadmap for a multi-site, high-bandwidth, low-latency compute and network infrastructure." The IOWN Global Forum gets the job of designing a communications architecture that uses its photonics-based optical communication technologies and is ready to meet the needs of users in major industries. OCP will design specs for open hardware that can connect to the kit IOWN devises and try to use its roots as a designer of hyperscale infrastructure to inform its efforts."

"The Open Compute Project (OCP) wants to develop specs for distributed datacenters and has decided the all-optical Innovative Optical and Wireless Network (IOWN) stack can make them possible."

OCP plans specifications for distributed datacenters and has selected the all-optical IOWN stack to enable them. The initiative, named "AI Computing Continuum", aims to deliver a seamless computational infrastructure from centralized to edge deployments. AI workloads are expected to move toward the edge for low-latency inferencing near users. Centralized datacenters must interconnect with regional data centers, colo facilities, telcos, private datacenters, factories, and offices to support edge AI. Those interconnections require very fast, high-bandwidth, low-latency links and will generate large data and traffic volumes. IOWN promises photonics-based networks with up to 125x capacity improvements and dramatic latency reductions. OCP will define open-hardware specs to interoperate with IOWN architectures.

Read at Theregister