The Open Compute Project (OCP) is moving forward with its core mission to help advance open specification for data centers, with a number of announcements today coming from the OCP Summit event.

Among the announcements is a partnership with the JEDEC Alliance to help bring chiplet technology into mainstream data center usage. OCP is also taking aim at data center hardware security. Rounding out OCP's announcements is a partnership with the Ultra Ethernet Consortium (UEC) to help improve networking for the increasing demands of artificial intelligence (AI) workloads.

[Related: Data center networking explained]

How OCP is looking to advance chiplet adoption

A chiplet is an emerging approach in silicon chip design to build smaller units of silicon than the common system-on-a-chip approach used today.

The collaboration between JEDEC and OCP is all about helping to establish global standards for novel device components like chiplets, eliminating fragmentation and duplicative efforts. To that end, OCP has released a Chiplet Description Schema (CDXML) specification to enable standardized descriptions of chiplets. This allows chiplet builders to provide electronic descriptions to customers. CDXML will be integrated into the JEDEC JEP30 standard.

CDXML provides standard descriptions of chiplets including thermal, physical, behavioral, power, electrical, test and security information. This enables automated system-in-package (SiP) design workflows and integration of multichiplets into stacked and 3D integrated circuits.

[caption id="attachment_135175" align="alignnone" width="1168"] Image source: Open Compute Project.[/caption]

Cliff Grossner, chief innovation officer at the OCP, said during a briefing with press and analysts that the organization is working on new initiatives with JEDEC and other standards organizations to define parts descriptions and other elements needed for improved chiplet production.

OCP takes aim at AI needs for Ethernet with UEC partnership

The Ultra Ethernet Consortium (UEC) was formed in July of this year in an effort to improve Ethernet for AI.

OCP and UEC are now announcing a new alliance to work together on next-generation data center equipment optimized for AI and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads. The alliance brings together UEC's expertise in modernizing Ethernet for specialized workloads and OCP's experience in specifying full system solutions and emerging technologies.

Goals of the alliance include enhancing Ethernet performance to address challenges with scale, bandwidth, multipathing and congestion for AI and HPC workloads. The alliance efforts will fast-track integration of UEC-inspired Ethernet enhancements into complete systems that OCP can deliver through its multivendor supply chain.

"We've been working on creating sustainable large-scale computational infrastructure for a very long time," Grossner said. "It's a very natural extension of what we do to fine-tune that for AI."

Grossner said the UEC work will complement what OCP is already doing for creating large-scale AI clusters with optical networking and specialized computation around large memory pools.

OCP looks to make data center firmware security S.A.F.E.

OCP today is also launching a new security program called S.A.F.E. (Security Appraisal Framework and Enablement) to improve data center hardware and firmware security.

The program provides an open-source, standardized audit checklist and criteria for selecting third-party auditors to review device firmware. Device vendors can commission an OCP-approved auditor (aka security review provider) to audit their firmware using the checklist. The goal of the effort is to reduce costs and redundancy around device security reviews, while providing assurance to customers on firmware updates.

"This is a new dimension and, really, a new entry point for the OCP," Steve Helvie, VP of emerging markets at OCP, said during the briefing. "We have been looking for a way to build a service around security compliance for quite some time without necessarily being the security audit firm. We think that this program is a good start to address hardware and firmware security within the data center."