Open Compute Project at CERN

The Open Compute Project, OCP ( http://www.opencompute.org/), was launched by Facebook in 2011 with the objective of building efficient computing infrastructures at lowest possible cost. The technologies are released as open hardware design, with the goal to develop servers and data centers following the model traditionally associated with open source software projects. We have been following the OCP project for some time and decided to buy two OCP twin servers in 2013 to get some hands-on experience. The servers have been tested and compared with our standard hardware regularly acquired through large tenders. In this presentation we will give some relevant results from this testing and also discuss some of the more important differences that can matter for a larger deployment at CERN. Finally it will outline the details for a possible project for a larger deployment of OCP hardware for production use at CERN