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The Open Compute Project

The Open Compute Project (OCP) is an initiative that was started by Facebook in April 2011. Facebook openly shared IP it had gained designing "one of the most efficient computing infrastructures at the lowest possible cost". The OCP foundation that was formed subsequently manages the pool of publicly available open IP for the design of low-cost, highly efficient data center and server solutions.

Penguin Computing and the OCP

Penguin Computing is an active, contributing member of the OCP and has submitted feature enhancements such as the addition of instrumentation extensions for power monitoring at the subsystem level. Joining the community driven OCP effort is a natural fit for us: Penguin has deep expertise in designing efficient data center infrastructures. As one of the early Linux pioneers, Penguin Computing has also always been committed to innovative, cost-effective and efficient community driven solutions.

Financial Services Open Platform - General purpose OCP

Like previous OCP platform designs the third generation design was optimized for high power efficiency and low acquisition and operating cost. Additional design considerations were reliability, compatibility and versatility. The platform offers redundant power supplies, is compatible with industry standard racks and features a universal motherboard base that can accommodate 70% to 80% of typical enterprise workloads. Target applications for the platform include HPC, SQL and no-SQL databases, ‘big data’ storage and cloud services. A single board design is leveraged to meet three basic use cases: HPC server, general purpose server for virtualization and scale out and storage server. The base motherboard design offers different configuration options and implementations. For the three basic use cases the respective variation of the base motherboard is integrated in an appropriate chassis.

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Second Generation OCP

The server motherboard is enclosed in a 1.5U high chassis striking a balance between compute density and the ability to easily cool the server. The chassis features a tool-less design and is designed for easy servicing. In the spirit of the vanity-free design, the bottom plate of one server serves as the top plate for the server beneath it. The chassis can accommodate up to three hard drives.

The OCP power supply is a 450W power supply delivering a single voltage of 12.5VDC. It has two input connectors: one for the 277VAC input and another that accepts 48VDC. The power-optimized, barebone motherboard is designed to provide the lowest capital and operating costs. AMD and Intel based motherboard options of current generation processors are available. The servers are housed in triplet racks, which contain 3 individual 42U columns. Each rack houses up to 90 servers plus 2 switches on top of the rack.

OCP data centers are among the most efficient data centers in the world. At Facebook's Prineville, Oregon data center,

  • Energy consumption per unit of computing power declined by 38%
  • With a PUE of 1.07, 93% of the energy from the grid makes it into every server, as compared to an industry average of 66% (PUE 1.5)
  • Key innovations include the removal of centralized chillers, the elimination of traditional in-line UPS systems and the elimination of a 480V to 208V transformation

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