SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Silicon photonics!

The phrase itself smacks of the future — the Star Trek, Iron Man future of cool-sounding technobabble and powerful gadgets. But it’s actually more reality than technobabble, as Intel showed today at the Open Compute Summit in Santa Clara, Calif.

Intel announced at the summit it is open-sourcing its silicon photonics technology, a specific hardware innovation that would be more cost-efficient as well as faster and more reliable for transferring data.

The technology could be used to give the entire Internet a boost of bandwidth with tiny, low-power devices.

Intel describes silicon photonics generally as “a new approach to using light (photons) to move huge amounts of data at very high speeds with extremely low power over a thin optical fiber rather than using electrical signals over a copper cable.”

The hardware company has spent the past two years working on its silicon photonics designs; today, it said it has developed production-ready engineering samples.

Facebook hardware chief Frank Frankovsky said in a blog post on the summit’s news that the technology would “enable 100 Gbps interconnects — enough bandwidth to serve multiple processor generations.

“This technology also has such low latency that we can take components that previously needed to be bound to the same motherboard and begin to spread them out within a rack.”

Intel’s prototype is a demonstration of the company’s photonic rack architecture for interconnecting compute, storage, and network resources, allowing the elements to be disaggregated in the rack and thus upgradable independent of one another — a main focus of the Open Compute Summit today. Intel will open-source its designs for enabling a photonic receptacle via OCP.

In a separate announcement, Intel reps said the silicon-based hardware “provides a distinct cost advantage over older optical technologies in addition to providing greater speed, reliability, and scalability benefits.

“Businesses with server farms or massive data centers could eliminate performance bottlenecks and ensure long-term upgradability while saving significant operational costs in space and energy.”

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SANTA CLARA, Calif. — This morning, Facebook and a slew of big names in cloud computing and data center hardware unleashed a whole boatload of news — new hardware designs, new jobs, and new partnerships — all around the Open Compute Project.

AMD and Intel both showed off some new hardware products. Rackspace announced it has customized its own server hardware around OCP designs — and contributed its customizations back to the project. And Fusion-io was talking about its new 3.2TB ioScale card, also an OCP product.

The Open Compute Project is the Internet and hardware industries’ attempt to make computing vastly more efficient by pooling knowledge and resources. Close competitors are actually working collaboratively to come up with a better motherboard, a better power supply. And it’s not just industry titans, either; anyone can download and modify the specs for Open Compute hardware.

Why should anyone with a day job and a social life care about this?

Two reasons: First, every time you click anything anywhere on the Internet, it takes a tiny toll on the environment — something with the impact of an ant’s footstep on a boulder. It takes electricity to power the machines that process the clicks and carry the data around the world, and most of that energy ain’t coming from wind farms.

Second, every click, every bit of data costs the companies behind web services a tiny amount of money, maybe hundredths of a cent, maybe thousandths of a cent. They’re paying to power the services, to store the data, and to employ the folks who keep the machines running.

In aggregate, those tiny costs add up to tons and tons of carbon and billions of dollars in bottom-line costs for companies like Facebook, Amazon, et cetera. So by putting aside their differences and competitiveness just long enough to make better, faster, cheaper, kinder-for-the-planet servers, these companies are ensuring a better environment for all of us as well as lower operating costs (and higher profits) for themselves — something Facebook in particular can’t afford to overlook.

This open-source hardware movement is still in its early days. Today marks the start of the Project’s fourth Open Compute Summit; while the first Open Compute efforts were driven by Facebook, today’s summit is thick with IT corporations from around the world.

“We’re seeing signs that the industry is changing, it’s becoming more open,” said Facebook hardware chief Frank Frankovsky (pictured above and below) today in his opening keynote. “Suppliers are seeing that there’s a radical change in this space.”

And as hardware becomes more open, not unlike the world of software, where open-source is the backbone of most systems, Frankovsky and others try to look into the near future and figure out where Open Compute and its network of partners should go next.

“Where it’s all headed in my mind is about breaking up the monolith … disaggregating the system design,” he said.

What that means, he continued, is changing the way data center hardware works. Instead of moving slowly and changing out whole stacks of hardware, Frankovsky says hardware should become — and is becoming — more flexible to meet consumers’ needs, more customizable to different configurations, and more quick to adapt to innovation.

“Today, one of the biggest challenges in hardware design is trying to predict where the software’s gonna be,” said Frankovsky. “There’s an impedance mismatch between the speed at which software moves and the speed at which hardware can move.”

He said “smarter technology refreshes and upgrades” is another challenge. So for OCP, breaking up the monolith means malleable configurations for data center gear, smarter tech upgrades, faster innovation for speedier components, and above all, openness.

New OCP members announced today include players in storage, telecom, and microprocessors: SanDisk, EMC2, Fusion-io, HGST, ARM, Tilera, Calxeda, NTT Data, and Orange. Cole Crawford, a Linux Foundation advisor and former Nebula exec, has been named OCP’s COO and is its first full-time employee.

Another exciting news item is the opening of OCP’s first international chapter, OCP Asia Pacific. With partners like Tencent, Baidu, and Alibaba, OCP already has a significant foothold in Asian markets, which are themselves hugely important hubs for hardware design and manufacturing. Interest in the region has been so strong that Frankovsky said some interested parties had taken it upon themselves to translate OCP specs into Japanese. Plus, he pointed out, “Asia’s going to have their own way to focus on their own issues,” such as earthquake tolerance and high-density physical spaces.

For Facebook’s part, the company is open-sourcing cold-storage versions of OpenVault and OpenStack, which are in use in its new-ish Sub-Zero cold storage facility, as well as Dragonstone, a new database server for its Swedish data center featuring high availability with dual motherboards and power supplies.

For more specifics, check out the OCP’s blog post on today’s announcements, and stay tuned for more news from the Summit.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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