Microsoft’s Project Olympus to accelerate innovation in hardware design

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3 November 2016

Microsoft’s latest contribution to Facebook’s Open Compute Project (OCP), the forum that allows big names in IT to share data centre hardware designs with minimal licensing restrictions, does not merely introduce a new server design, it changes the way the designs are conceived, submitted, and collaborated on.

Microsoft plans to share designs with the OCP as early as possible in the design process.

Incompleteness theorem
Project Olympus, as Microsoft’s new initiative is called, involves “contributing our next generation cloud hardware designs [to the OCP] when they are approx. 50% complete — much earlier in the cycle than any previous OCP project,” Microsoft said in a post on the official Azure blog.

Microsoft’s rationale for sharing an incomplete design is that “open source hardware development is currently not as agile and iterative as open source software. … By sharing designs that are actively in development, Project Olympus will allow the community to contribute to the ecosystem by downloading, modifying, and forking the hardware design just like open source software.”

One of OCP’s original benefits was a faster design process, and some of the products Microsoft has been experimenting with do seem to demand a shorter iteration cycle. Consider Microsoft’s recent foray into using FPGAs to accelerate data centre operations. The overall layout of a system board that implements FPGAs may change only slightly, but the way an FPGA is integrated into the whole could change a great deal. Sharing each interim iteration might inspire others to also take that path less travelled.

Azure or not Azure?
Microsoft’s pitch for Project Olympus, both the most recent incarnation of the hardware and the project itself, focuses mainly on products for Microsoft’s own data centres. “[Microsoft’s] initial contributions were server and data centre designs that power the Azure hyperscale cloud,” Microsoft said.

With any talk of Azure cloud hardware, there’s likely to also be talk of Azure Stack, Microsoft’s hybrid cloud system that deploys Azure’s bits in a private cloud by way of certified partner hardware. But Olympus is not intended to influence design decisions for Azure Stack — at least not directly; the two projects were conceived separately and with discrete aims. When asked if the two projects would have any connection, a Microsoft spokesman said that “today, there is no overlap between Project Olympus and Azure Stack.”

However, there is nothing that says Microsoft’s hardware partners couldn’t take cues from Olympus — either for their certified Azure Stack creations or for anything else they come up with. As Microsoft’s spokesperson said, “[Microsoft] intends for Project Olympus to become the foundation for a broad ecosystem of compliant hardware products developed by the OCP community, including something that Microsoft partners could build on.”

 

IDG News Service

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