OCP Cooling

OCP Cooling is an Open Compute Project (OCP) initiative that defines open hardware specifications, reference designs, and best practices for data center cooling systems to improve energy and resource efficiency at scale.

• Focus on open, vendor-neutral specifications for data center thermal management (data center infrastructure).
• Development and sharing of cooling reference designs for OCP-compliant hardware and facilities (hardware design).
• Guidance on liquid and air cooling approaches, including facility and IT-level integration (thermal engineering).
• Collaboration forum for operators, suppliers, and integrators on deployment practices and validation (industry collaboration).
• Alignment of cooling designs with OCP’s efficiency, scalability, and openness objectives (infrastructure optimization).

More About OCP Cooling

OCP Cooling is a project within the Open Compute Project (OCP) that addresses the thermal management aspects of OCP data centers and IT hardware. The project focuses on open specifications, shared designs, and deployment practices for cooling systems that support OCP-compliant infrastructure. Its scope covers both IT-level cooling for servers and racks and facility-level integration in OCP-style data centers.

The project’s purpose is to provide a collaborative environment where data center operators, technology suppliers, and engineering teams can define, document, and refine cooling approaches that align with OCP principles of openness and efficiency. Within this scope, OCP Cooling works on specifications and reference designs for thermal management (data center infrastructure), including guidance around air cooling, liquid cooling, and hybrid approaches where these are relevant to OCP hardware and racks.

OCP Cooling activity includes creating and maintaining design guidelines and documentation that help enterprises deploy OCP-compliant hardware within facilities that meet targeted power and thermal profiles. This can include requirements and recommendations for rack-level cooling interfaces, coolant distribution, airflow management, and integration with facility mechanical systems (mechanical and HVAC engineering). The project also serves as a forum for cross-company collaboration on qualification methods, testing considerations, and operational practices related to cooling.

In enterprise and hyperscale environments, OCP Cooling materials are used by data center designers, facility engineers, and platform engineering teams when planning or retrofitting facilities for OCP racks and servers. The project’s outputs support decisions around the choice of cooling technologies, mechanical layouts, and integration points with power and monitoring infrastructure (capacity planning and infrastructure design). By providing open specifications, the project enables multi-vendor ecosystems where different hardware and facility components can interoperate under defined thermal and mechanical constraints.

From a technical taxonomy perspective, OCP Cooling falls under data center infrastructure and facility engineering, with a specific focus on thermal management for open hardware platforms. It relates to other OCP projects by ensuring that the mechanical and cooling characteristics of servers, racks, and power systems are documented in ways that enable consistent deployment. The project’s documents and specifications are used as reference material in design cycles, procurement, and operational runbooks for organizations implementing OCP-based data centers.