Facebook's Open Compute Project

Amir Michael
Facebook

This talk will review the Open Compute Project, an initiative to share the custom-engineered technology in Facebook's first dedicated data center in Prineville, Oregon.

This technology delivered a 38 percent increase in energy efficiency at 24 percent lower cost for Facebook. Inspired by the success of open source software, and aiming to encourage industry-wide collaboration around best practices for data center and server technology, Facebook has published technical specifications and mechanical CAD files for the Prineville data center's servers, power supplies, server racks, battery backup systems and building design.

This technology enabled the data center to achieve an initial power usage effectiveness (PUE) ratio of 1.07, compared with 1.5 for our existing facilities, which fall into the best practice category as defined by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Established by the Green Grid in 2007, PUE is an indicator of data center energy efficiency, and the lower the number, the better.

An overview of the motivations behind this project, the design of the data center and servers, our current and future open strategy contextualized by other open source software and hardware projects, and our aims to drive both technological and environmental efficiency at Facebook and the broader industry, will be presented.

Slides:

There is no downloadable version of the slides for this talk available at this time.

About the speaker:

Amir Michael joined Facebook in 2009 and leads the System Engineering team responsible for developing and adopting next generation hardware infrastructure that power one of the most-trafficked sites in the world. Amir was part of a small team at Facebook that embarked on project to build one of the most efficient computing infrastructures at the lowest possible cost. The result of that project was a Facebook first dedicated data center which is 38% more efficient and 24% less expensive to build and run than other state-of-the-art data centers. Amir plays an active role in the Open Compute Project, Facebook's initiative to share the custom-engineered technology in its first dedicated data center as an open source project. Prior to Facebook, Amir worked at Google where he developed server and data center infrastructure. Amir holds a Bachelor of Science in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Contact information:

Amir Michael
Facebook