Major Internet companies such as Microsoft, Google and Facebook are designing the racks themselves. A couple of years ago, Facebook has decided to make it easier to develop a process server. Thus was born a community Open Compute Project, under which manufacturers of components and assemblies have to create a server ecosystem that would facilitate the development of equipment for the data center and in a way to unify the main parts.
In the past year, AMD joined the project , with its extensible platform-board AMD Open 3.0 (codenamed Roadrunner) .The company intends to support Facebook "open" not only with x86-based solutions, but also processors on ARM architecture . Moreover, plans include the development of server cards that x86-based and ARM-based processors can be changed .
Yesterday, IBM decided to join the competing project. The company announced that it together with Google, Mellanox, NVIDIA and Tyan companies organizes OpenPower, which will promote an open platform and architecture of IBM Power.
The consortium promises to open microcode compatible software and advanced technology to develop servers and data centers based on IBM platforms. It is stated that in the future to design a data-processing center will be a simple task. It is particularly important to the emergence of the consortium OpenPower of NVIDIA, which somehow passed the draft Facebook. Together with IBM developer of graphics accelerators and accelerator calculations will develop computing based on CUDA and, in general, GPGPU-calculations in conjunction with the processor IBM. Note IBM and NVIDIA are not included in the group HSA Foundation, organized by AMD and ARM to promote heterogeneous (heterogeneous) computing. However, we doubt that the market will be able to make two separate groups with similar interests but different platforms.