"You can feel the energy".
Rebecca Weekly, Chair of the Open Computer Project, provides a wrap-up of this year's #OCPSummit20222 in San Jose, California.
Sustainability has become a key tenet for everything at OCP. A new working group was established. Future technologies, including optical interconnects, are being explored. Innovation in data center infrastructure remains the focus.
Ericsson's shares experienced a sharp drop on Thursday after the company reported that Q3 Group Net Sales grew by 3% organically to SEK 68.0 billion (approx. US$6.031 billion), driven by strong performance from Networks.
Börje Ekholm, President and CEO of Ericsson, stated: "We see robust underlying performance and strong momentum in the business as we continue to execute on our strategy. This includes leadership in mobile networks by growing market share. Since 2017 we have increased RAN market share, excluding Mainland China, from 33% to 39% and we have had multiple contract wins across geographies in this quarter. We continue to solidify our strong position in 5G to capture the considerable opportunities presented by the fastest scaling mobile generation. Our expansion into the exciting high-growth Enterprise space is gaining momentum with the acquisition of Vonage, providing us with access to a powerful range of cloud communication services."
Some highlights
Marvell's first 3nm silicon is now in fabrication with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) on its 3nm shuttle. Marvell said this advancement will enable it to develop some of the most advanced multi-die, multi-chiplet systems-in-package (SiP) for its infrastructure products and co-development of custom ASIC solutions optimized for some of the most challenging infrastructure use cases, such as machine learning.
The 3nm platform includes foundational IP building blocks such as long reach SerDes, PCIe Gen6 PHY, and several standards-based die-to-die interconnect technologies for managing data flow across the data infrastructure.
This 3nm development follows numerous 5nm solutions from Marvell – in production or development – that span electro-optics, switch, PHY, compute, 5G baseband, and storage products, as well as a wide range of custom ASIC programs.
Additionally, this IP portfolio is compatible with 2.5D packaging technologies such as TSMC’s leading-edge 2.5D Chip-on-Wafer-on-Substrate (CoWoS)
Hugh Durdan provides a perspective.
https://youtu.be/mUYoLecCWoI
AT&T disclosed plans of getting to an even dozen 5G Edge Zones by the end of 2022, up from the current count of 10.
The Edge Zone facilities are standalone network cores with software defined network capabilities located in network data centers close to cross connect facilities that have fast connections to nearby cloud facilities run by the “hyperscaler” cloud providers.
AT&T says these edge zones powered by regional 5G standalone network cores will open a range of new capabilities that simply aren’t possible with 4G.
https://about.att.com/blogs/2022/legg-5g-edge-zones.html
Arelion completed a series of trials with Acacia and Cisco over multiple, third-party, open line systems.
On a live fiber route with existing ROADM infrastructure between Hamburg and Copenhagen, Arelion successfully leveraged Acacia Bright 400ZR+ QSFP-DD coherent modules with greater than +1 dBm transmit power between Cisco 8000 and NCS 5700 router platforms. The trial demonstrated the seamless integration of Routed Optical Networking with DWDM transponders carrying wavelength services.
Acacia's Bright 400ZR+ pluggable coherent optical modules can plug into Cisco routers, enabling Arelion's further adoption of the simpler and more scalable architecture of Routed Optical Networking, combining innovations in silicon, optics and routing systems.
Arelion also highlighted the interworking on brownfield long-haul applications built with third-party optical line systems
"Multi-layer architecture has always been challenging to scale and operate due to decades of accumulated complexity. With this latest trial, Arelion demonstrated the possibility to simplify conversion and interoperability, bringing us closer to Routed Optical Networking that evolves cost structures, scalability and efficiency," said Dariusz Solowiej, VP Network Technology & Customer Operations at Arelion. "400G coherent pluggables will help our customers secure high-performance connectivity at the lowest cost and help us grow our networks in scale as we continue to connect the world."
"As the latest entrant in our comprehensive family of 400G pluggables, the Bright 400ZR+ QSFP-DD is designed to expand optical transceiver applications by supporting higher transmit power and performance consistent with legacy coherent optics," Benny Mikkelsen, Vice President/Chief Technology Officer at Acacia, now part of Cisco. "The ability of these solutions to meet the varying needs of network operators, while driving economies of scale on a common technology platform, is a key advantage for providers such as Arelion to grow their networks."
https://www.arelion.com/about-us/press-releases/400G-field-trial.html
Citing strong, sustained momentum in customer additions across its growing 5G wireless and fiber networks, AT&T reported Q3 2022 revenue of $30.0 billion versus $31.3 billion in the year-ago quarter, down 4.1% reflecting the impact of the U.S. Video separation in July 2021. Excluding the impact of U.S. Video, operating revenues for standalone AT&T were up 3.1%, from $29.1 billion in the year-ago quarter. This increase primarily reflects higher Mobility revenues, and to a lesser extent Consumer Wireline and Mexico, partly offset by lower Business Wireline revenues.
“We’re investing at record levels to enhance our 5G and fiber connectivity and to deliver the best experience available in the market,” said John Stankey, AT&T CEO. “Our results show our strategy is resonating with customers as we continue to see robust levels of postpaid phone net adds and approach 1 million AT&T Fiber net adds for the year."
Some highlights:
https://about.att.com/story/2022/q3-earnings.html
Equinix announced a US$45 million investment for the construction of BG2, a new International Business Exchange (IBX) in Bogotá - its second data center in Colombia.
The initial phase of BG2 will have a capacity for 550 cabinets, with space for additional cabinets in future phases. At full build, the facility will provide capacity for 1,100 cabinets.
The Open Compute Project Foundation (OCP) and the Linux Foundation (LF), which are now collaborating on hardware-software co-design strategy, announced "Caliptra", a new effort to standardize silicon embedded hardware root of trust (ROT) security.
Caliptra is supported by AMD, NVIDIA, Microsoft and Google. The hardware root of trust provides a set of security properties that anchor the security of a system-on-a-chip (SOC), including CPUs, GPUs and SSDs, into the hardware.
"An important part of the OCP mission, on top of serving our hyperscale operator community, is to make it easy for everyone to consume hyperscale innovations, which end up embedded in OCP recognized products. Understanding that deployable solutions need hardware and software that is integrated into a complete and validated solution, we are pleased to be able to bring together the strengths of the Linux Foundation for collaborative open source software development and the OCP for hardware specifications, and ability to develop supply chains for emerging markets. As part of the expanded collaboration with LF, we are pleased to have new security contributions from Google and Microsoft," said George Tchaparian, CEO Open Compute Project Foundation.
"The Linux Foundation is happy to collaborate with the OCP to create communities that participate on both LF and OCP projects with a common goal and harmonized process to deliver market ready solutions combining open hardware and software," said Arpit Joshipura, general manager, Networking, Edge, and IoT, the Linux Foundation. "We also look forward to partnering with the OCP on go-to-market initiatives developing emerging market supply chains in support of our vendor and system integrator members."
"Independent hardware and software initiatives by different communities and consortiums often require significant integration efforts by the industry. Vendors need to convert and integrate the initiative into solutions with the market need in mind. The net effect is that many innovations never see the light of the day or serve the needs of the broader market. The expanded collaboration between the Open Compute Project and Linux Foundation has the strong potential to accelerate the absorption of open innovations into meaningful products and services", said Ashish Nadkarni, Group Vice President and General Manager, Worldwide Infrastructure at IDC.
https://www.opencompute.org/blog/cloud-security-integrating-trust-into-every-chip
CXL can enable memory expansion within a system locally, but also can enable more innovative solutions that allow pooling/sharing of memory across multiple hosts.
The Composable Memory Systems Project aims to follow a a hardware-software co-design strategy , developing a community to standardize and drive adoption of tiered and hybrid memory technologies and solutions that can benefit data center applications across industries such as AI-ML/HPC, Virtualized Servers and Cache/Databases.
OCP members who have joined this effort include Meta, Microsoft, Intel, Micron, Samsung, AMD, VMware, Uber, ARM, SMART Modular, Cisco and MemVerge. As the group becomes a formal sub-project under the OCP Server Project, the industry can join and drive the memory focused innovations to adoption.
As the CSM group formally launches as an OCP Project, we would like to invite all of you to participate and help us drive this next frontier of innovation for computational infrastructure systems from the perspective of a hardware and software and systems architecture.
https://www.opencompute.org/blog/ocp-launches-composable-memory-systems-subgroup
Software-defined memory systems have tremendous potential to accelerate innovation in large data centers. Manoj Wadekar, Hardware Systems Technologist, Meta, shares a perspective on discussions underway at OCP Summit 2022 in San Jose, California.
Telecom Infra Project is launching a new project group to address metaverse-ready networks.
The TIP Metaverse-Ready Networks Project Group’s primary objective is to accelerate the development of solutions and architectures that enhance network readiness to support metaverse experiences. Meta Platforms, Microsoft, Sparkle, T-Mobile and Telefónica will be the initial co-chairs of the Project Group.
Working in close collaboration, the Project Group will aim to align on industry-wide network capabilities, specific APIs and mechanisms required to access end-to-end (E2E) network capabilities supporting immersive applications at scale. The group will define requirements and methods for measuring E2E Quality of Experience (QoE), and provide a prioritization of future network architectures needed to achieve metaverse readiness.
Alex Harmand, Head of Network Platforms at Telefónica and Co-Chair of the MRN Project Group said: “This new group will enable operators to address the exciting opportunities that the metaverse is creating in both the consumer and enterprise segments. Telefonica is looking forward to collaborating to define the network capabilities and associated APIs needed to enhance metaverse services. The TIP community is the perfect environment for this initiative, as it will allow us to leverage multiple current project groups, such as OpenRAN, Open Optical and Packet Transport, to deliver end-to-end architectures and solutions that we will then test in Telefonica’s and other TIP Community Labs.”
https://telecominfraproject.com/tip-launches-metaverse-ready-networks-project-group/
EllaLink, which operates a subsea cable directly connecting Europe to Latin America, plans to build a direct connection between Sines and the Lisbon Metro Area via a new subsea cable.
The multi-petabit capacity "Olisipo" system will connect all the international submarine landings in Portugal with the major data centers in the region, including the data centers of Start Campus NEST in Sines and Altice LDV in Lisbon. The cable will land in Carcavelos and Sines and will be ready to branch into Seixal & Sesimbra cable landing stations and connect the Setubal area.
The unrepeatered, 110km fully buried cable will incorporate 288 fibers, providing a design capacity of 4.3 Petabits. The cable robustness will be enforced by particular care given to route engineering with special attention to cable crossing, full subsea and terrestrial burial strategy, full cable armouring and extra shore-end protection with bore pipe in Sines.
The Olisipo system will provide direct POP to POP connectivity at fibre pair level between the main Data Centres located in Sines and Lisbon Metro Area, connecting at day one
https://ella.link/2022/10/18/olisipo-the-new-ellalink-cable-petabits/
Cobalt Digital demonstrated high-speed transport of uncompressed audio and video signals in an SMPTE-2110 environment using ADVA’s Oscilloquartz timing technology. The trial network offers a simple, reliable and low-cost way to share broadcast streams in multiple digital formats at the highest quality.
The demonstration featured OSA 5401 small form-factor pluggable (SFP) PTP grandmasters and Digital’s high-density audio and video processing technology with native SMPTE-2110 support and multiple 25 Gbps Ethernet interfaces.
“This demo verifies the viability of an incredibly flexible technology for transporting video, audio and broadcast data without the need for compression or reformatting. With Indigo, our next-generation platform, and ADVA’s unique timing plug, the trial solution delivers the highest levels of availability and quality and with an extremely small footprint,” said Suzana Brady, SVP of worldwide sales and marketing at Cobalt Digital. “ADVA’s pluggable Oscilloquartz timing device enables quick and simple deployment in a power-on and run environment. It removes the complexity of local network configurations and can support both GNSS-based and arbitrary time modes.”
“Leveraging our most compact Oscilloquartz PTP timing technology, this demo shows how broadcast and media production network operators can achieve higher speeds while significantly improving efficiency. By processing natively over IP, Cobalt Digital’s platform removes complexity and significantly reduces cost,” commented Gil Biran, GM of Oscilloquartz, ADVA. “High-quality video and audio transmission rely on accurate and stable timing and our pluggable device was crucial to the success of this trial. The flexibility and simplicity of our accessSync™ OSA 5401 SyncPlug™ were key as well as its ability to distribute timing to many devices from a single SFP.”
American Tower has deployed Nokia's Altiplano Open Access solution for fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) infrastructure in Argentina. The network controller solution uses virtualization to share network resources as slices of a physical network, enabling the wholesaling of fiber access on a Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) basis.
American Tower has already onboarded three virtual network operator tenants in the country. The new FTTH network in Argentina, with Nokia as the sole supplier, reaches close to a million homes passed.
Paul Choiseul, Vice President of Innovation - Transport and Networking - OCTO at American Tower, said: “Open Fiber to the home networks are growing rapidly and we’re delighted to be partnering with Nokia to help our network tenants deliver high speed broadband services and network connectivity to their residential and business customers in Argentina. With Nokia’s collaboration, we are leveraging the Altiplano SDAN Domain Controller to enhance our neutral host Network-as-a-service (NaaS) platform, allowing enhanced automation and delivering autonomy of operation to our virtual operators. Through the use of industry-standard APIs, Altiplano allows us to grant virtual network operators a “slice” of our network they can operate in a similar fashion as they would operate their own infrastructure, so they can offer differentiated wholesale products to address the unique needs of their customers and the services they require.”
NL-ix, the largest European distributed internet exchange provider, is deploying Nokia's 7750 SR-s platforms, powered by the FP5 routing silicon. The deployment will enable NL-ix to begin the rollout of 400GE and 800GE access and interconnection services for its cloud provider and national research and education network (NREN) customers.
This deployment of Nokia’s FP5 is one of the earliest in Europe. Its high capacity 400GE and 800GE capability will accelerate NL-ix’s ability to meet current and future customer demand for higher speed access and interconnection services at lower costs and with greater power efficiency. FP5 allows the delivery of more than three times the capacity as the Nokia FP4 hardware in the same space and power envelope.
The new deployment of the Nokia 7750 SR-14s will enable NL-ix to offer 800GE connectivity and increase the density of 400GE services in any of the more than 100 European data centers in which it operates. The IP deployment complements NL-ix’s European-wide low latency optical transport network provided by Nokia in 2021.
Mark Vanderhaegen, Director of Webscale Accounts at Nokia, said: “The rapid expansion of NL-ix makes it one of the largest and fastest growing internet exchange providers in the world. With this growth comes increasing customer demand for much higher speed access and interconnection. We are delighted that NL-ix has chosen Nokia’s market-leading IP routing platforms powered by FP5 silicon to upgrade its pan-European IP network infrastructure to 800Gb/s speeds.”
At Open Compute Project Summit in San Jose, Meta unveiled Grand Teton, its next-generation, GPU-based hardware platform. Compared to its Zion, its predecessor, Grand Teton boasts 4x the host-to-GPU bandwidth, 2x the compute and data network bandwidth, and 2x the power envelope. Grand Teton also has an integrated chassis in contrast to Zion-EX, which comprises multiple independent subsystems.
Grand Teton has been designed with greater compute capacity to better support memory-bandwidth-bound workloads at Meta, such as its open source DLRMs. Grand Teton’s expanded operational compute power envelope also optimizes it for compute-bound workloads, such as content understanding.
The previous-generation Zion platform consists of three boxes: a CPU head node, a switch sync system, and a GPU system, and requires external cabling to connect everything. Grand Teton integrates this into a single chassis with fully integrated power, control, compute, and fabric interfaces for better overall performance, signal integrity, and thermal performance.
This high level of integration dramatically simplifies the deployment of Grand Teton, allowing it to be introduced into data center fleets faster and with fewer potential points of failure, while providing rapid scale with increased reliability.
Meta also introduced Open Rack v3 (ORV3), a data center rack with a frame and power infrastructure capable of supporting a wide range of use cases — including support for Grand Teton.
ORV3’s power shelf isn’t bolted to the busbar. Instead, the power shelf installs anywhere in the rack, which enables flexible rack configurations. Multiple shelves can be installed on a single busbar to support 30kW racks, while 48VDC output will support the higher power transmission needs of future AI accelerators. It also features an improved battery backup unit, upping the capacity to four minutes, compared with the previous model’s 90 seconds, and with a power capacity of 15kW per shelf. Like the power shelf, this backup unit installs anywhere in the rack for customization and provides 30kW when installed as a pair.
https://engineering.fb.com/2022/10/18/open-source/ocp-summit-2022-grand-teton/
The OCP Foundation has adopted Sustainability as a new top-level project and as the 5th Tenet to ensure that all work efforts across all OCP Projects have a focus on sustainability.
OCP’s Sustainability top-level project will set reporting targets, monitor and plan compliance with external regulations and best practices, develop high level sustainability KPIs that go beyond traditional data center measures such as power usage effectiveness (PUE), and assemble sustainability technology and process roadmaps for the larger OCP Community to follow under the OCP’s new Sustainability Tenet.
Sustainability efforts carried out across the OCP will focus on technology specific implementations of the directions set by its new OCP Sustainability Project.
Currently within the OCP there are sustainability efforts in cooling environments involving increasing thermal management efficiency with liquid based cooling technologies such as immersion and cold plate cooling and heat re-use. Beyond thermal optimizations, data center facilities efforts are working to optimize carbon associated from operations and data center facilities construction, and the manufacturing of IT equipment.
Designing for circularity is also an important focus to positively control the lifecycle of IT physical infrastructure. For example, firmware needs to be open to promote reuse and improve long term sustainability. OCP hardware specifications will continue to evolve to enable products to remain in use for as long as possible, and design for circularity to enable infrastructure within the data center to be repurposed, and ultimately enable component and material recovery when decommissioned.
"The OCP community has a responsibility to contribute towards reducing the environmental impact of the industry, and drive conversations within their influence to impact technologies deployed in the data centers. The tenets of the OCP foster openness that enables mainstream delivery of the most efficient designs for scalable computing and uniquely positions OCP to be an effective agent for climate action. Adding a mandate for sustainability looking at transparency, circularity, and embodied carbon in IT equipment, silicon and data center facilities will add significant weight to our ability to help the industry minimize its impact on the environment," said George Tchaparian, CEO Open Compute Project Foundation.
Windstream Wholesale, along with its partners Coherent and Nokia, completed full integration of the 400 Gig, 0 dBm QSFP-DD Pluggable into the generally available Nokia 7250 IXR X1 and 7250 IXR-X3 routers.
The integrated solution is ready for full commercial deployment, accelerating Windstream’s ICON and ICON-Edge network strategy.
Windstream announced in October 2021 co-development with Coherent (formerly II-VI) of the world’s first high performance 0 dBm, 400G QSFP-DD coherent pluggable module – making these transceivers compatible with existing and emerging modern ROADM-based photonic layers supporting multi-service, multi-layer, open and interoperable architectures.
Highlights:
“This announcement demonstrates Windstream’s technology leadership in the evolution of both optical and packet networking,” said Art Nichols, chief technology officer for Windstream Enterprise and Wholesale. “Windstream’s ability to manage everything from the base science technology through system integration is key to achieving new architectural breakthroughs. Coherent and Nokia have been outstanding partners throughout the development process.”
“It’s been exciting to work with Windstream and Nokia at the frontier of high-speed transmission technology, transforming proprietary line cards into standardized pluggable transceivers that are much easier to provision on Nokia’s routers and deploy in Windstream’s network,” said Matthias Berger, vice president, Coherent Technology, Coherent Corp.
From Extended Reality (XR) and the Metaverse to the future of Enterprise connectivity, Jan Söderström walks us through the highlights of Ericsson's Imagine Possible event in Silicon Valley on October 18 and 19, 2022.
The USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF) published the USB4 Version 2.0 specification, a major update to enable USB 80 Gbps performance over the USB Type-C cable and connector.
This doubles the maximum aggregate bandwidth of USB to the benefit of higher-performance displays, storage, and USB-based hubs and docks.
The USB Type-C and USB Power Delivery (USB PD) specifications have also been updated to support this higher level of data performance.
Highlights:
“For engineers, USB4 is defined by its multi-protocol tunneling that architecturally differentiates it from its predecessors – USB 3.2 and USB 2.0,” said Brad Saunders, USB-IF Board Chair and CEO. “This updated technical specification extends USB4 speed and data protocol performance, enabling manufacturers to develop products that can deliver USB 80Gbps in addition to existing USB 40Gbps and USB 20Gbps to end users.”
