Google has announced that it is joining Facebook’s Open Compute Project and is working with the social media giant on new open source hardware for data centers. Google will be contributing new server rack specifications that improve power efficiency. The new rack delivers about four times more electrical power and increases voltage from 12 to 48.
Urs Hölzle, the head of Google’s cloud platform business has indicated that the new rack standard that Facebook and Google are working on could utilize a GPU-based system to drive the neural network. While GPUs were originally designed for graphic-intensive applications, they are also well suited for running deep neural networks. He told Wired, “ Power density is going up. GPUs are something that accelerate this – or amplifies it.” The Open Compute Project was started by Facebook in 2011 and allows companies to share designs of their data center products. Companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Intel are already a part of the project. Seagate recently unveiled the world’s fastest NVMe SSD that meets with the specifications of the Open Compute Project. The drive has a transfer rate of 10GBps and the company says that it is ideal for hyperscale data centers.