The Open Compute Project Launches the first OCP Experience Center in North America, hosted by Arm

The Open Compute Project (OCP) inaugurated the OCP Experience Center in November of 2021 to accelerate collaboration among the OCP Community through a hands-on environment to see, evaluate and learn about OCP Accepted and OCP Inspired hardware in a facility that is OCP Ready certified. Since then, eight experience centers have been setup across EMEA and Asia Pacific regions by various OCP Community members. Today, OCP is excited to announce the latest addition, and the first OCP Experience Center in North America, which will be hosted by Arm, a platinum member of OCP since 2018.

The data deluge is driving the need for more heterogeneous compute and has accelerated the rise of artificial intelligence, machine learning and cloud-native technologies. However, these technologies perform best when the underlying compute is purpose built for data processing at scale. Data centers, cloud and telco providers benefit from standardized equipment in their racks for their day-to-day operations. This requires a common set of standards and certifications which are widely accepted within the industry that can be applied to heterogenous compute infrastructure.

“It’s exciting to see Arm increase their commitment to OCP with the launch of the first OCP Experience Center in North America. The new OCP Experience Center hosted by Arm is an example of how the community is seeding emerging markets providing access to open technologies,” said Steve Helvie, VP of channel, OCP. “With the launch of this new center Arm has also become a certified OCP Solution Provider highlighting their ability to accelerate the delivery of OCP and Arm SystemReady solutions to market.”

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Hosted in Bedminster, New Jersey, the OCP Experience Center aims to share industry-wide best practices from the OCP Community for data center and server technology. Arm, in partnership with Tech Mahindra, is committed to supporting this initiative by aligning the Arm SystemReady program to OCP requirements, customers have a clear path to deliver OCP Ready™ Arm-based servers and workstations. Arm SystemReady is a widely adopted industry standards-based initiative, accompanied by a compliance test suite, specifications, and a certification process to ensure software just works on Arm. Companies including ADLINK, AMI, Ampere, and Wiwynn have already delivered Arm SystemReady certified devices and are key initial partners collaborating with Arm on the OCP Experience Center.

“As a platinum member of OCP, Arm is committed to supporting the growing demands of compute infrastructure and we share in OCP’s mission to empower openness and collaboration,” said Imran Yusuf, director of hardware ecosystem, Infrastructure Line of Business, Arm. “We look forward to how the OCP Experience Center will accelerate Arm-based data center, cloud and telco deployment-ready hardware.”

OCP is on a mission to apply the benefits of open source and open collaboration to hardware and rapidly increase the pace of innovation in, near and around the data center’s networking equipment, general purpose and GPU servers, storage devices and appliances, and scalable rack designs. Beyond the data center, OCP’s collaboration model also helps to advance the telecom industry and edge infrastructure. By working with Arm on the new OCP Experience Center, we can accelerate innovation and collaboration across the Arm ecosystem and OCP community to build highly efficient, OCP-optimized infrastructure for cloud-to-edge environments.

“Working closely with Arm and Ampere, we are proud to have brought the very first Arm-based COM-HPC reference system, AVA Developer Platform, to the market, and one that offers extraordinary performance-per-watt,” said Alex Wang, senior product manager, Computer-on-Modules Product Center, ADLINK. “Being Arm SystemReady SR-certified not only ensures that most standard aarch64 Linux distributions can work right out of the box, but also the full scope of existing software available can be applied with little to no modification.”

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“Ampere is championing open ecosystems via our hardware contributions to the Open Compute Project as well as software projects that span open firmware, the Linux kernel and open source Cloud Native applications,” said Sean Varley, senior director of product marketing, Ampere. “As we build the next era of cloud computing, one that is Cloud Native from the processor to applications, we enthusiastically support open access to resource centers such as the new OCP Experience Center for communities to develop, collaborate and validate the full Cloud Native platform on Ampere.”

“AMI is excited to be part of the new OCP Experience Center hosted by Arm. As an OCP platinum member and an existing member of the Arm SystemReady certification Program, we are committed to supporting our partners seeking certification for their Arm-based platforms,” said Zachary Bobroff, senior director of the product office, AMI. “We believe this new experience center will improve collaboration and help us better serve our partners’ needs. We look forward to continued success in our partnership with Arm.”

“OCP is gearing up its community-led operations to address crucial industry concerns. Tech Mahindra in collaboration with Arm is pleased to host the OCP North American Experience Center,” said Rohit Madhok, global head of digital engineering services, Tech Mahindra. “As a leading provider of digital transformation, consulting, business re-engineering services and solutions, and one of the key industry systems integrator and Engineering R&D partner for Communications Technology Providers, we aim to bring our long-standing association with Arm and demonstrate our industry expertise and technology capabilities towards OCP Community.”

“Wiwynn is committed to workload and energy-optimized IT solutions from cloud to edge. We have seen the efficiency gains and lower TCO of the Arm architecture in our Ampere Altra-based SV328R server for cloud data centers,” said Steven Lu, Wiwynn’s Senior Vice President. “We are pleased to join the new OCP Experience Center hosted by Arm to further drive Arm SystemReady standards and build flexible, scalable, and optimized hardware platforms for the OCP Community”

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