So is 48V DC a big deal for the Data Center? Google's OCP contribution

Google's Urs Hoelzle announcing the contribution of 48V and rack design at OCP summit was the news of the Summit.

Google's contribution is posted here.

Why is 48V a big deal? if you are pushing higher performing chips as Google's Urs Hoelzle has discussed in his paper on the need for brawny cores vs. wimpy cores.  There is a need for GPUs as mentioned in the post.

As the industry's working to solve these same problems and dealing with higher-power workloads, such as GPUs for machine learning, it makes sense to standardize this new design by working with OCP. We believe this will help everyone adopt this next generation power architecture, and realize the same power efficiency and cost benefits as Google.

Why would Google contribute the 48V DC design?  As one ex-Googler said at OCP Google wants to reduce the cost of the 48V DC converters and to do that they need more volume.  And Google has a history of sharing its innovations.  See the below timeline on Google's contributions

The Missed Opportunity for Open Compute Summit - Business Focus on Scale Out

I have gone to every Open Compute Summit since they have started.  I've met many of the founders of the effort and watched over the years as OCP has developed.  OCP has grown beyond what I thought it could be when I went to the first event in Palo Alto.

A friend asked what is my biggest take away from OCP Summit 2016?

My biggest take away is the OCP is not marketing themselves correctly.  They should be focusing on this is the conference for “scale out.”  They have all the pieces.  The OCP staff are not focused on the business.   The vendors are screaming for more business focus.  And the customers want it too.

I want to give credit to one of OCP founders who is ex-Facebook and ex-Google who said, "OCP is the one scale-out conference."  OMG you are right.  This is the one scale out conference where data centers, racks, compute, storage, and network are all considered for scale-out infrastructure.

BTW, I think the OCP staff do a great job running the event which is a type business focus.  The above business I mention is the focus on the issues to run a scale-out infrastructure.

We'll see if OCP Summit 2017 focuses on the theme of scale-out and the sponsors who are interested in this theme.

Google Joins Open Compute

Wired reports on Google joining Open Compute.  There is no word of this at OCP Summit.  Must be the big news that Jay Parikh will announce in 10 minutes.

http://www.wired.com/2016/03/google-facebook-designing-open-source-data-center-gear-together/

Happy to Share

Google’s Urs Hölzle—one of the company’s first employees and the engineer most responsible for what is probably the world’s largest and most advanced computer network—doesn’t see today’s announcement as a big change. He points out that Google has openly discussed its internal hardware designs in the past.

“I know that historically in the press, there has been a tendency to position it as Open Compute Project versus Google. But it has never been like that,” he says. “Over the past ten years, we have shared many, many things with the industry. This is the latest one.”

 

 

Google Deepmind AlphaGo wins 1st game vs champion, my son thinks it is so cool

My son last week asked what "Watson" was.  He had seen a Youtube video and he wanted to know what it was.

Instead of geeking out on trying to explain Watson like the above video I showed the Google DeepMind AlphaGo video that shows a specific application of compute power.

He then asked where is the computer that runs DeepMind.  DeepMind is in a data center like the one we drive by in The Dalles.

Google DeepMind AlphaGo just beat a Go Champion in the 1st of a 5 game match.

Google's AlphaGo AI defeats human in first game of Go contest
Machine takes 1-0 lead in historic five-game matchup between computer program developed by DeepMind and world’s best Go player Lee Sedol

Now my son wants to visit Google to see a data center.That's so cool.  On the other hand his older 14 yr old sister is not on the same page how cool a visit would be.  :-)  One of these days I may get my daughter interested in data centers.