Open Compute taps IOWN to help design distributed datacenters and a 'computing continuum'

The Open Compute Project (OCP) wants to develop specs for distributed datacenters and has decided the all-optical Innovative Optical and Wireless Network (IOWN) stack can make them possible.

OCP calls its new effort the “AI Computing Continuum” and hopes it will deliver “a seamless computational infrastructure from centralized to edge deployments.”

It’s widely expected that AI workloads will increasingly move to the network edge, where lightweight models can undertake inferencing close to users so latency won’t negatively impact UX.

But edge AI won’t stand alone, so as OCP points out in its announcement, centralized datacenters will need to connect with geographically distributed resources in regional data centers, colocation facilities, telcos, private datacenters, factories, and even individual offices.

Communication between those facilities will need to be fast, again to prevent high latency. The links OCP envisages also have the potential to create huge amounts of data and network ...