The IT industry has spent the past several decades making the argument that openness in software is important and that community-driven, collaboratively-developed projects are a superior engineering model. The unquestioned success of large-scale open source software efforts - including Linux, Kubernetes, Java, and tens of thousands of other projects - shows the power that comes with worldwide collaboration in all aspects of software design & development. The argument for open source software has been made and proven true in practice.
While your software is likely open and created collaboratively, what about the hardware you are running that software on? Open hardware has also found success - including in the maker space with ecosystems such as Raspberry Pi, and in the data center with efforts such as the Open Compute Project (OCP). This worldwide collaboration - just past its 10th birthday - has seen hyperscale computing customers, vendors, & service providers work together on hardware through published specifications, open designs, collaborative projects, and pushing- the- envelope demonstrations. When these projects are pursued collaboratively and in open communities, the speed and depth of innovation are enhanced. These collaboratively designed systems are already some of the largest, most energy efficient, and operationally efficient systems in the world today.
By bringing a sustainability lens & a circular economy approach, these efficiency gains can reach backwards and forwards into the supply chain to create both economic wins & aggressive carbon footprint reductions. Recent efforts have shown that by extending the usage of hardware systems and components we can reduce as much as 75% of the lifetime carbon emissions that would take place by mining new minerals, building new factories, activating production lines, and moving materials all around the world. These efforts have shown that we can achieve aggressive decarbonization goals, without compromising quality, reliability or performance.
Erik Riedel, PhD is a regular speaker on both technical, leadership, and cultural topics. He has worked for over twenty years as an engineer and engineering leader. He is currently founder and Chief Engineering Officer at Flax Computing - working to measure and reduce the worldwide... Read More →
