Microsoft unveils new phase for Project Olympus

Microsoft’s Project Olympus is now 100 percent complete and open sourced via OCP contributions, according to the company.

Microsoft first introduced Project Olympus last year. And in that time, the server design wasn’t quite complete. The company instead decided to release the first version to allow the community to build innovations around the initial product.

But now, Project Olympus is entering a new phase. The biggest change is that Microsoft has introduced Project Cerberus, a new open source project for platform security to be collaboratively developed with the OCP community. This also means there will be new capabilities available to users. Here are some of them.

Volume production in Azure

Using the Fv2 family, which includes the fastest VMs in Azure, Project Olympus hardware is now deployed in volume production. This new capability addresses the growing demand for massive large-scale computation from users who need to accomplish a variety of tasks including financial modeling, scientific analysis, genomics, geothermal visualization, and deep learning.

Open source additions and commercially availability

All Project Olympus designs, specifications, and management functions have been open source and contributed to OCP. Now, the OCP community can utilize those specifications to create derivative designs. In addition, Project Olympus hardware is now commercially available for procurement via OCP Solution Providers. Right now, that includes Wiwynn and ZT Systems. And more providers are likely to follow.

Project Cerberus

And perhaps the biggest new innovation is the introduction of Project Cerberus, a project that protects, detects, and recovers data from attacks on platform firmware. Project Cerberus is a NIST 800-193-compliant hardware root of trust that is specifically designed to security features for all firmware on the platform. Since Project Olympus is basically a hardware platform intended for the open source community to build upon, Microsoft is now turning its focus to cybersecurity to make sure that all the complexities and different aspects of the platform are secure, even with all the new innovations from the OCP community.

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