The Open Compute Project Global Summit 2024 (aka OCP24) took place in San Jose October 15-17. OCP is a show dedicated to computing, and participation over the past couple of years has been supercharged by AI. While most of the attendees at OCP24 met to discuss AI architectures, power, liquid cooling, and software, there was a standing-room only session for those who recognize how important networking and optics are to the current and future scalability of AI nodes. Meta made the point that the answer to the question of how to get more accurate results from large AI models without building larger arrays of GPUs is still unknown (more accuracy requires more parameters which requires larger GPU arrays), which means there is no end in sight to the demand for optical bandwidth in the datacenter.
This year, for the first time, there were two booths on the show floor from optics vendors Accelink and Ciena. With CIOE and ECOC just barely in the rearview mirror, and with OCP not being a traditional optical show, there weren’t any major optical announcements. However, there were intriguing discussions on the future of optics inside the datacenter, and OCP is perhaps the best place to hear from startups with interesting ideas for AI optics.
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