jdf

SEATTLE, Washington – April 16, 2024 – The Linux Foundation is excited to announce the launch of Margo, a new open standard initiative for interoperability at the edge of industrial automation ecosystems. Drawing its name from the Latin word for edge, Margo defines the mechanisms for interoperability between edge applications, edge devices, and edge orchestration software. The open standard promises to bring much needed flexibility, simplicity, and scalability – unlocking barriers to innovation in complex, multi-vendor environments and accelerating digital transformation for organizations of all sizes. 

Hosted by the Joint Development Foundation, a part of the Linux Foundation family, the initiative is supported by some of the largest automation ecosystem providers globally, including founding members ABB (including B&R), Capgemini, Microsoft, Rockwell Automation, Schneider Electric (including AVEVA) and Siemens. The group invites like-minded industry peers to join the collaboration and contribute to building a meaningful and effective interoperability standard that will help customers achieve their digital transformation goals with greater speed and efficiency. 

“At the core of Margo development is a commitment to delivering interoperability in a modern and agile way,” said Bart Nieuwborg, Chair of the Margo Initiative and Senior Program Manager, Rockwell Automation. “A comprehensive open-source reference implementation aims to facilitate the adoption, and the associated compliance test toolkit will ensure the trust in Margo’s interoperability promise, paving the way for the industry to tap the full potential of, for example, data and AI at the edge.” 

“The idea that users should be free to create the best solution for their needs without unnecessary constraints, costs, or delays embodies the spirit of open-source collaboration,” said Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation. “Open interoperability among a wide selection of apps and devices will reduce the need for specialized resources and streamline the deployment, scaling and operation of multi-vendor ecosystems.” 

Margo is set to transform the way systems and providers interoperate, fostering growth and value generation within the industrial automation ecosystem. To learn more about Margo and how you can participate, please visit www.margo.org. Interested participants are invited to attend the Capgemini booth at Hannover Messe on Tuesday April 23^rd, for an in-depth presentation about Margo at 11:00 AM CEST. More details about the event can be found here.
 

Supporting Quotes 

“Mastering efficiency, flexibility and quality faster than competitors is key to success in today’s industrial world. Digitalization can help deliver on these benefits, but digital ecosystems require a robust, secure and interoperable framework at the edge, connecting operations and information technologies. For ABB, a long-standing advocate of open automation systems, driving a forward-thinking collaborative initiative like Margo is key to achieving this goal.”
– Bernhard Eschermann Chief Technology Officer, ABB Process Automation  

 “Interoperability is the key to digital transformation at scale – empowering manufacturers to unlock the potential of the Industrial IoT at full speed without large teams of IT specialists.”
– Florian Schneeberger, Chief Technology Officer, B&R (Member of the ABB Group)  

“In the constantly evolving realm of technology, edge interoperability stands out as a pivotal focus area for industrial automation, as a key driver for the seamless integration of industrial devices, applications, and their orchestration. The Margo initiative, with the aim of establishing an open standard that simplifies and standardizes industrial automation, represents a step change in the way complex industrial ecosystems are considered and will enable significant breakthroughs in innovation, optimization, and new value creation, and will help clients accelerate towards a more intelligent industry. As a pioneer in the field of edge compute-based industrial automation and founding member of the Margo initiative, Capgemini will bring its strong expertise in digital engineering to help the creation of this new open standard and accelerate the transformation of the industrial automation ecosystem.”
– Nicolas Rousseau, Head of digital engineering and manufacturing, Group Offer Leader Intelligent Products & Services, Capgemini.

“Microsoft is thrilled to be supporting Margo and continuing our efforts to help industrial customers accelerate their digital transformation journey.  Our customers tell us every day about the challenges to scale and operate their industrial solutions due to a lack of interoperability at the edge.  They want help to reduce the complexity, cost, and time to value.  Microsoft is committed to align our adaptive cloud strategy architecture, such as Azure Arc and Azure IoT Operations, with the Margo initiative to help our customers build, deploy, and scale their applications faster, and run them both on the edge or in the cloud”.
– Christoph Berlin, General Manager, Microsoft Azure.   

“At a time when industrial organizations are racing to accelerate their digital transformations, we’ve seen that building, operating, and scaling Industrial IoT solutions continues to be a challenge for our customers due to the disparate nature of the systems in the market today. We’re excited to be collaborating with The Linux Foundation, and our partners, by bringing over 100 years of experience in industrial automation and information to the creation of Margo and working together to ensure that Margo’s modern IT-based principles for edge interoperability meet the requirements of the OT world, breaking down our customers current barriers to success and enabling innovative operations.”
– Cyril Perducat, SR VP & Chief Technology Officer, Rockwell Automation.  

“Today our industrial users have to manage more and more data to optimize their processes, machines and energy consumption. They have a strong need to compute data at field level with customized edge applications for different use cases and from multiple vendors.  For many years, Schneider Electric has been focused on meeting those needs with simpler, scalable and more cost-effective automation, fostering innovation for an open industrial software approach and leveraging AVEVA’s expertise. The Margo initiative is deeply aligned with our vision and commitment for an automation ecosystem which is interoperable and sustainable.”
– Aurelien Le Sant, CTO- SVP Innovation & Technology, Industrial Automation, Schneider Electric    

“With Industrial Operations X and Siemens Industrial Edge, we are committed to ecosystem openness. Margo supports extending the cross-vendor approach, enriching solution capabilities through a common standard.“ 
– Rolf Heinsohn, SVP Control at Siemens  

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About the Joint Development Foundation 

The Joint Development Foundation (JDF), part of the Linux Foundation family of projects, accelerates organizations developing technical specifications, standards, data sets, and source code. JDF provides the corporate and legal infrastructure, experienced support staff, and extensive network necessary to achieve the highest levels of industry and international standardization. For more information, please visit us at jointdevelopment.org. 

About the Linux Foundation 

The Linux Foundation is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, hardware, standards, and data. Linux Foundation projects are critical to the world’s infrastructure including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, ONAP, PyTorch, RISC-V, SPDX, OpenChain, and more. The Linux Foundation focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users, and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org. The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see its trademark usage page: www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.  

Media Contact 

Noah Lehman 

The Linux Foundation 

nlehman@linuxfoundation.org

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – November 8, 2023 – Google, Microsoft, and Meta announced they are formally partnering as the founding steering committee to improve app security through a newly restructured App Defense Alliance, under the Joint Development Foundation, part of the Linux Foundation family. The steering committee plans to expand the scope of the Alliance to foster collaborative implementation of industry standards for app security.

Launched by Google in 2019, the App Defense Alliance was established to ensure the safety of the Google Play Store and the Android app ecosystem by focusing on malware detection and prevention. With a growing emphasis on app security standards, the Alliance expanded its scope in 2022 and is now the home for several industry-led collaborations including Malware Mitigation, and App Security Assessments for both mobile and cloud applications.

The evolution of the App Defense Alliance under the JDF represents a significant step forward and demonstrates a shared commitment by the members to strengthen app security and related standards across ecosystems. With a member community spanning an additional 17 General and Contributor Members, the Alliance will support industry-wide adoption of app security best practices and guidelines, as well as countermeasures against emerging security risks.

“The App Defense Alliance will help further strengthen trust and confidence in overall app safety by uniting with others in the industry that share an unwavering commitment to protect users,” said Dave Kleidermacher, VP of Engineering for Android and Made-by-Google Security & Privacy at Google. “I want to thank the other original founding members of the App Defense Alliance from when we started this back in 2019. Google will continue to partner with these mobile threat detection providers to combat threats while actively partnering with the App Defense Alliance and the community to help make apps safer for all users across ecosystems.”

“Successful app ecosystems depend on trust,” said Jenny Hall, Director of Reality Labs Trust at Meta. “The App Defense Alliance will help our industry work with community members to define open standards that help protect people and their data. This is a tremendous opportunity for stakeholders with diverse perspectives to work together in the interest of providing more security and trust to those who use apps regardless of the ecosystem.” 

“Trustworthiness of the app ecosystem is critical for end users and for the software industry,” said Oliver Bell, General Manager, Trust and Privacy at Microsoft. “Through this alliance, we aim to help leverage the industry standards that empower developers and end users to build and trust the huge array of solutions in the third-party application ecosystem.”

“The App Defense Alliance’s move to the Joint Development Foundation reflects our dedication to open collaboration and innovation in the realm of app security,” said Jim Zemlin, Executive Director at the Linux Foundation. “By uniting technology leaders and fostering an open ecosystem of cross-platform requirements, we aim to unlock new dimensions of performance and security for the benefit of our community.”

The App Defense Alliance is committed to driving open collaboration and innovation in app security and invites interested organizations to explore membership. To learn more, including how to get involved, participate in discussions, and help shape the evolving role of the Alliance within the ecosystem, please visit their website.

About the Joint Development Foundation

The Joint Development Foundation (JDF), part of the Linux Foundation family of projects, accelerates organizations developing technical specifications, standards, data sets, and source code. JDF provides the corporate and legal infrastructure, experienced support staff, and extensive network necessary to achieve the highest levels of industry and international standardization. For more information, please visit us at jointdevelopment.org.

Media Contact

The Linux Foundation

Noah Lehman

Digital Communications Manager

nlehman@linuxfoundation.org

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QUOTES FROM GENERAL AND CONTRIBUTOR MEMBERS

General and Contributor Members of the App Defense Alliance include BishopFox, Dekra, ESET, KPMG, Leviathan, Lookout, McAfee, NCC Group, NetSentries Technologies FZCO, NowSecure, Orange Cyberdefense South Africa Ltd, Prescient Security, PwC, Schellman, TAC Security, TrendMicro, and Zimperium.

“Bishop Fox holds distinction as a long-standing partner-of-choice for large product and service ecosystems, serving as a preferred vendor for the Google Partner Program and Meta Workplace since the inception of both programs, including having conducted the most Google Partner Assessments to date. While all the vendors have put rigorous methodologies in place individually, by standardizing the methodology and coordination of partner pen-testing under the ADA, Google, Meta and Microsoft are creating an even stronger environment of integrity and trust for partners and customers.” – Gwen Castro, Chief Growth Officer, Bishop Fox.

“At DEKRA, as a Contributing Member, we are proud to display our strong dedication and expertise towards fostering the security of applications. Together, we are confident that we can overcome the challenges that lie ahead and we are committed to setting new industry standards, making significant strides towards a safer and more secure digital landscape.” – Rubén Lirio Vera, Head of Cybersecurity Services, DEKTRA.

“As a founding member of the App Defense Alliance, ESET is pleased to see the organization continue to evolve to ensure the Google Play Store and the Android app ecosystem stay one step ahead of cybercriminals. Since 2019, ESET has worked closely with the Alliance to investigate and detect malicious apps, uncover sophisticated threats and protect billions of consumers and businesses from unique banking trojans, spyware, ransomware and many other types of threats. There is still much work to do to stay ahead of cyber adversaries, and we will support the Alliance’s continued expansion and evolution under the stewardship of the Linux Foundation.” – Tony Anscombe, Chief Security Evangelist, ESET.

“For over a decade, Leviathan has been working with all three founding members of the App Defense Alliance. This partnership through the Joint Development Foundation represents an exciting new opportunity to collaborate with all the stakeholders.”  – Frank Heidt, CEO, Leviathan Security Group.

“Lookout is dedicated to protecting individuals and organizations from the ever-growing threat landscape by providing a data-centric approach to endpoint and cloud security. We provide complete protection against modern cyber attacks, including app, cloud and network threats, phishing attacks, social engineering, credential theft and more. Since 2019, Lookout and Google have worked together through the App Defense Alliance to identify and remove malicious apps from the Google Play Store before they become a threat to the general public. Combining Lookout’s expertise with Alliance resources will create a safer and more secure mobile ecosystem for everyone.” – David Richardson, Vice President of Endpoint and Threat Intelligence, Lookout. 

“NCC Group is delighted to continue to support the App Defense Alliance (ADA) in its mission to establish application security assessment frameworks for mobile and cloud app developers that sensibly raise the bar on the safety and security of the world’s biggest software ecosystems. In support of our purpose to create a more secure digital future, we look forward to ensuring better security outcomes by continuing to guide the development of ADA’s security testing standards and delivering security assessments to the hundreds of software development organizations who’ve participated in similar programs over the last year.” – Kevin Brown, Chief Operating Officer, NCC Group.

“NetSentries partners with Global banks and Forbes 2000 companies across four continents to deliver independent audits and Enterprise security assessments. Our core expertise lies in securing complex, scalable modern-day applications that extensively leverage cloud services and technologies. With a combination of intelligence-driven active assessments, policy, and control validation, our team engages to ensure your security and success with the best-in-class customer experience. We go beyond traditional Security assessment by enabling your team to remediate risks faster and implement threat-informed defense to respond against adversaries.” – Sudheer EP, CEO, NetSentries Technologies. 

“NowSecure is excited to be a pioneer in the evolution of the App Defense Alliance. NowSecure champions the critical need for mobile app security and privacy, and strongly advocates for standards-based testing and validation leveraging automation and expertise. The increased reach of the App Defense Alliance with the Joint Development Foundation and the Linux Foundation will help scale the protection of the global mobile app ecosystem used by billions.” – Alan Snyder, CEO, NowSecure.

“We are excited to partner with JDF / Linux Foundation and collaborate with Google, Meta, Microsoft and other tech giants. As a part of this program, our goal is to help thousands of the app developers achieve and maintain strong security posture. As an offensive security company we dare to make security and compliance accessible to every app developer. We stay committed to supporting the foundation in its mission to protect trust in the app development ecosystem.“ – Fabrice Mouret, President, Prescient Security.

“As a proud member of the App Defense Alliance, Trend Micro fully supports the upcoming phase of enhanced collaboration and standard development that will contribute to a secure and connected world. Our mission is to make the world safe for exchanging digital information, and we are enthusiastic about the continued collaboration with other partner organizations within this broader ecosystem.” – Yamz Yaneza, Senior Manager, Cybersecurity Threat Research, Trend Micro Incorporated.

“As one of the founding App Defense Alliance partners, Zimperium is excited about and supports the migration of the original App Defense Alliance moving under the Linux Foundation – Joint Development Foundation project as a new external alliance. Zimperium looks forward to working closely with the Alliance board, as well as with new and existing alliance members to evolve the program’s mission to create a trusted, open, and collaborative alliance across industry leaders – helping drive the development and adoption of industry-approved best practices, security standards, and innovative countermeasures to combat app-based threats and vulnerabilities.” – Chris Cinnamo, SVP, Office of the CTO, Zimperium.

BILBAO, SPAIN – September 19, 2023 –  Today, the Linux Foundation announced the formation of the Unified Acceleration (UXL) Foundation, a cross-industry group committed to delivering an open standard accelerator programming model that simplifies development of performant, cross-platform applications. Hosted by the Linux Foundation’s Joint Development Foundation (JDF), the Unified Acceleration Foundation brings together ecosystem participants to establish an open standard for developing applications that deliver performance across a wide range of architectures.   

The Unified Acceleration Foundation is an evolution of the oneAPI initiative, which has witnessed significant growth as an open programming model that spans different architectures such as CPU, GPU, FPGA, and accelerators. With many open source projects and community contributions, the formation of the UXL Foundation, guided by a dedicated steering committee, marks the next critical step in driving innovation and implementing the oneAPI specification across the industry.

“The Unified Acceleration Foundation exemplifies the power of collaboration and the open-source approach,” said Jim Zemlin, Executive Director at the Linux Foundation. “By uniting leading technology companies and fostering an open ecosystem of cross-platform development, we will unlock new possibilities in performance and productivity for data-centric solutions.”

The Unified Acceleration Foundation boasts a distinguished list of participating organizations and partners, including Arm, Fujitsu, Google Cloud, Imagination Technologies, Intel, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. and Samsung. These industry leaders have come together to promote open source collaboration and development of a cross architecture unified programming model.

“The foundation members aspire to build the largest open ecosystem for accelerated computing. The initial contributions to the foundation will bring an existing open standards based platform with open governance. Our ultimate aim is to foster a multi-architecture and multi-vendor programming platform for all accelerators,” said Rod Burns, VP Ecosystem, Codeplay Software and UXL Foundation Steering Committee Chair.

“Linux and GNU transformed the CPU software stack through open source and standards, encompassing everything from embedded to cloud computing. As a founding member of the Unified Acceleration Foundation, I believe that open source and standards are essential for creating a cross platform software stack for GPU’s and other accelerators that will serve as the foundation for the next generation of computationally and data-intensive applications,” said Robert Cohn, Intel Corporation, oneAPI Specification Editor.

The Unified Acceleration Foundation is enabling solutions that are productive, performant, and provide customers with the freedom to choose the hardware that best fits their unique needs. To learn more about the Unified Acceleration Foundation, including how to get involved as a developer or member, visit UXLFoundation.org.

About the Joint Development Foundation

The Joint Development Foundation (JDF), part of the Linux Foundation family of projects, accelerates organizations developing technical specifications, standards, data sets, and source code. JDF provides the corporate and legal infrastructure, experienced support staff, and extensive network necessary to achieve the highest levels of industry and international standardization. For more information, please visit us at jointdevelopment.org.

Media Contact

Noah Lehman

The Linux Foundation

nlehman@linuxfoundation.org

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Supporting Quotes

Linux Foundation

“The Unified Acceleration Foundation exemplifies the power of collaboration and the open-source approach,” said Jim Zemlin, Executive Director at the Linux Foundation. “By uniting leading technology companies and fostering an ecosystem of cross-platform development, we will unlock new possibilities in performance and productivity for data-centric solutions.”

Fujitsu

“The future of human centric, sustainable digital transformation needs a holistic approach to technology development and open collaboration with the international community,” said Hirai Kouichi, Head of Software Development Division under the Advanced Technology Development Unit, Fujitsu. “The Unified Accelerator foundation’s innovative strategy of building a unified development ecosystem will play a vital role in advancing the creation of cross-platform software and accelerators.”

Google Cloud 

“The growing diversity of accelerators presents a tremendous opportunity for the industry but can also introduce challenges,” said George Elissaios, Sr. Director, HPC and ML infrastructure at Google Cloud. “Consistent programming models help developers write code that can run efficiently on any accelerator, fostering innovation and choice.”

Imagination Technologies

“The technology that is improving our day-to-day experiences of driving, entertainment, healthcare and more, is increasingly data-intensive and complex,” said Shreyas Derashri, Vice President of Compute Product Management at Imagination Technologies. “A new open and collaborative approach to computing is required to provide the necessary acceleration in an efficient and performant manner, whether in the cloud or at the edge. As a founding member of the Unified Acceleration Foundation, Imagination Technologies will help unite the technology ecosystem around the oneAPI spec and encourage its widespread adoption for compute and AI acceleration.”

Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.

“As a new independent entity, the Unified Acceleration Foundation will help build an open source programming model across a wide range of architectures and vendors,” said Vinesh Sukumar, Senior Director of Product Management, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. “This helps to address a critical need in the industry for flexible and open source alternatives that will enable a broad range of unique needs.”

Samsung

“Samsung is pleased to be part of the Unified Acceleration Foundation, which will help expand the basis and adoption for memory coupled computing technologies, such as PIM and PNM”, said Seungwon Lee, Master and lead of computing software team at Samsung Advanced Institute of technology(SAIT). “We expect the open collaboration will also bolster programming models and software stacks to effectively accelerate AI/HPC applications in future datacenter and supercomputing systems.”

Argonne 

“Our goal at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility is to make our users more productive, and one approach is to support a common code base capable of running across multiple architectures,”  said Michael E. Papka, Director, Argonne Leadership Computing Facility. “With oneAPI’s open programming model, future developers can create applications that use the hardware available without needing to hand-tune code. The Unified Acceleration Foundation allows users to have a voice in the future of oneAPI, and this will help us and our user community make high-performance compute codes portable.”

In an era marked by rapid technological advancement, the role of standards in driving innovation and ensuring quality can’t be overstated. To that end, the Joint Development Foundation, a neutral and non-profit home to important industry-driven open standards such as AV1, SPDX, C2PA, and more, is proud to co-host the upcoming CHIPS Research and Development (R&D) Standards Summit alongside CHIPS Research and Development Office (CHIPS R&D Office), the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), the IEEE Industry Standards and Technology Organization (IEEE-ISTO), the International Electronics Manufacturing Initiative (iNEMI), IPC International, the Joint Development Foundation (JDF), the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development Program (NITRD), the National Nanotechnology Coordination Office (NNCO), SEMI North America, and the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA).  

The summit will bring together industry leaders in the semiconductor and microelectronics space to discuss opportunities for standards-driven innovation, incubating and accelerating ideas across industry, academia, and government, providing training and education, and enabling a standards-capable workforce. The summit signifies a strong commitment to excellence and collaboration in the semiconductor and microelectronics industry and a community-driven approach to exploring its future.

Why you should attend

The CHIPS R&D Standards Summit is the first point on a roadmap of innovation, cooperation, investment, and engagement in standards for this economically-critical industry. Industry leaders and standards development experts will come together to discuss:

• A Platform for Innovation: The summit brings together thought leaders from across the globe to shape the future of semiconductor and microelectronics standards. It’s a chance to be part of defining the industry’s trajectory.

• Global Collaboration: With options to attend in person or virtually, the summit ensures that insights and contributions worldwide are integral to the discussions.

• Education and Training Opportunities: From incubators to accelerators, the summit explores innovative ways to enable standards at the pace of innovation, providing educational and training opportunities.

• Diverse and Inclusive Workforces: The summit aims to build a diverse, standards-capable workforce, reflecting our commitment to inclusivity.
• A Future of Excellence: The summit is a stepping stone towards a future where participants observe and actively shape standards.

Be part of the future

The CHIPS R&D Standards Summit is an ideal opportunity to to actively participate in, collaborate on, and influence the future of standards development within the semiconductor and microelectronics industry.

Visit the CHIPS R&D Standards Summit event page to learn more.

Join us on September 26 and 27, and let’s shape the future together. 

SAN FRANCISCO – Aug. 1, 2023 – Pixar, Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, and NVIDIA, together with the Joint Development Foundation (JDF), a part of the Linux Foundation family, today announced the Alliance for OpenUSD (AOUSD) to promote the standardization, development, evolution, and growth of Pixar’s Universal Scene Description technology.

The alliance seeks to standardize the 3D ecosystem by advancing the capabilities of Open Universal Scene Description (OpenUSD). By promoting greater interoperability of 3D tools and data, the alliance will enable developers and content creators to describe, compose, and simulate large-scale 3D projects and build an ever-widening range of 3D-enabled products and services.

Created by Pixar Animation Studios, OpenUSD is a high-performance 3D scene description technology that offers robust interoperability across tools, data, and workflows. Already known for its ability to collaboratively capture artistic expression and streamline cinematic content production, OpenUSD’s power and flexibility make it an ideal content platform to embrace the needs of new industries and applications.

The alliance will develop written specifications detailing the features of OpenUSD. This will enable greater compatibility and wider adoption, integration, and implementation, and allows inclusion by other standards bodies into their specifications. The Linux Foundation’s JDF was chosen to house the project, as it will enable open, efficient, and effective development of OpenUSD specifications, while providing a path to recognition through the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

AOUSD will also provide the primary forum for the collaborative definition of enhancements to the technology by the greater industry. The alliance invites a broad range of companies and organizations to join and participate in shaping the future of OpenUSD.

“Universal Scene Description was invented at Pixar and is the technological foundation of our state-of-the-art animation pipeline,” said Steve May, Chief Technology Officer at Pixar and Chairperson of AOUSD. “OpenUSD is based on years of research and application in Pixar filmmaking. We open-sourced the project in 2016, and the influence of OpenUSD now expands beyond film, visual effects, and animation and into other industries that increasingly rely on 3D data for media interchange. With the announcement of AOUSD, we signal the exciting next step: the continued evolution of OpenUSD as a technology and its position as an international standard.”

“At Adobe, we believe in providing artists a set of flexible and powerful solutions running on a variety of devices,” said Guido Quaroni, Senior Director of Engineering, 3D&I at Adobe. “Leveraging a common 3D data representation during the creative process multiplies the value brought by each package and device. OpenUSD was created to be one of these ‘multipliers’ and we are excited to see a diverse group of companies joining together to support this innovative and open technology.”

“OpenUSD will help accelerate the next generation of AR experiences, from artistic creation to content delivery, and produce an ever-widening array of spatial computing applications,” said Mike Rockwell, Apple’s vice president of the Vision Products Group. “Apple has been an active contributor to the development of USD, and it is an essential technology for the groundbreaking visionOS platform, as well as the new Reality Composer Pro developer tool. We look forward to fostering its growth into a broadly adopted standard.”

“Whether you’re building CG worlds or digital twins or looking ahead to the 3D web, content creators need a cohesive way to collaborate and share data across tools, services, and platforms,” said Gordon Bradley, Fellow, Media & Entertainment, Autodesk. “Autodesk is excited to support the Alliance for OpenUSD as it drives 3D interoperability for visual effects, animation, and beyond, and supports our vision to help customers design and make a better world.”  

“OpenUSD gives 3D developers, artists, and designers the complete foundation to tackle large-scale industrial, digital content creation, and simulation workloads with broad multi-app interoperability,” said Guy Martin, Director of Open Source and Standards at NVIDIA. “This alliance is a unique opportunity to accelerate OpenUSD collaboration globally by building formal standards across industries and initiatives to realize 3D worlds and industrial digitalization.”

AOUSD steering committee members will be speaking at both the Academy Software Foundation’s Open Source Days on Aug. 6 and at the SIGGRAPH conference at the Autodesk Vision Series on Aug. 8 at 1 p.m. PT in Room 404A.

To learn more about AOUSD and how to get involved, visit www.aousd.org. To tune into the Academy Software Foundation panel on USD on Aug. 6, 2023, visit the website. 

View Quotes from Members and Supporters

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About the Joint Development Foundation

The Joint Development Foundation (JDF), part of the Linux Foundation Family, provides the corporate and legal infrastructure to enable organizations to develop technical specifications, standards, data sets, and source code. JDF projects such as Ultra Ethernet Consortium, Alliance for Open Media, Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity, and Overture Maps Foundation innovate markets, lead change, and champion open participation and licensing policies. For more information, please visit us at jointdevelopment.org.

About the Linux Foundation

The Linux Foundation is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, hardware, standards, and data. Linux Foundation projects are critical to the world’s infrastructure including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, ONAP, PyTorch, RISC-V, SPDX, OpenChain, and more. The Linux Foundation focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users, and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org. 

The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see its trademark usage page: www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. 

Media Contact:

Noah Lehman

The Linux Foundation

nlehman@linuxfoundation.org

UEC to deliver on Ethernet-based open, interoperable, high-performance full-communications stack architecture to meet the growing network demands of AI & HPC at scale

SAN FRANCISCO, July 19, 2023 /PRNewswire/ — Announced today, Ultra Ethernet Consortium (UEC) is bringing together leading companies for industry-wide cooperation to build a complete Ethernet-based communication stack architecture for high-performance networking. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and High-Performance Computing (HPC) workloads are rapidly evolving and require best-in-class functionality, performance, interoperability and total cost of ownership, without sacrificing developer and end-user friendliness. The Ultra Ethernet solution stack will capitalize on Ethernet’s ubiquity and flexibility for handling a wide variety of workloads while being scalable and cost-effective. 

Ultra Ethernet Consortium is founded by companies with long-standing history and experience in high-performance solutions. Each member is contributing significantly to the broader ecosystem of high-performance in an egalitarian manner. The founding members include AMD, Arista, Broadcom, Cisco, Eviden (an Atos Business), HPE, Intel, Meta and Microsoft, who collectively have decades of networking, AI, cloud and high-performance computing-at-scale deployments.

“This isn’t about overhauling Ethernet,” said Dr. J Metz, Chair of the Ultra Ethernet Consortium. “It’s about tuning Ethernet to improve efficiency for workloads with specific performance requirements. We’re looking at every layer – from the physical all the way through the software layers – to find the best way to improve efficiency and performance at scale.”  

The consortium will work on minimizing communication stack changes while maintaining and promoting Ethernet interoperability.

The technical goals for the consortium are to develop specifications, APIs, and source code to define:

1. Protocols, electrical and optical signaling characteristics, application program interfaces and/or data structures for Ethernet communications.
2. Link-level and end-to-end network transport protocols to extend or replace existing link and transport protocols.
3. Link-level and end-to-end congestion, telemetry and signaling mechanisms; each of the foregoing suitable for artificial intelligence, machine learning and high-performance computing environments.
4. Software, storage, management and security constructs to facilitate a variety of workloads and operating environments.

UEC will follow a systematic approach with modular, compatible, interoperable layers with tight integration to provide a holistic improvement for demanding workloads. The founding companies are seeding the consortium with highly valuable contributions in four working groups: Physical Layer, Link Layer, Transport Layer and Software Layer.

UEC is a Joint Development Foundation project hosted by The Linux Foundation. UEC will begin accepting applications for new members in Q4 2023. More information can be found at ultraethernet.org

View Quotes from Founding Members and Industry Analysts

About The Joint Development Foundation
The Joint Development Foundation, part of the Linux Foundation Family, provides the corporate and legal infrastructure to enable organizations to develop technical specifications, standards, data sets and source code. JDF projects such as Ultra Ethernet Consortium, Alliance for Open Media, Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity and Overture Maps Foundation innovate markets, lead change and champion open participation and licensing policies. For more information, please visit us at jointdevelopment.org.

Media Contact
Noah Lehman
The Linux Foundation
nlehman@linuxfoundation.org

SOURCE The Linux Foundation

Linux Foundation Training and Certification has released Antitrust Laws and Open Source Software Project Management and Participation (LFC105), a one-hour video course by Andrew Updegrove, Founding Partner at Gesmer Updegrove LLP. Trainees will gain basic understanding of what antitrust and competition laws are all about, and how they apply to open source development. It will also cover best practices of safe collaboration and the types of activities that should be avoided.

A complementary webinar recording focused on standards development organizations has also been released. Participants of Joint Development Foundation Series projects are encouraged to take the training course and watch the webinar.

The Linux Foundation today announced the formation of the Overture Maps Foundation, a new collaborative effort to develop interoperable open map data as a shared asset that can strengthen mapping services worldwide. The initiative was founded by Amazon Web Services (AWS), Meta, Microsoft, and TomTom and is open to all communities with a common interest in building open map data.

Overture is a Joint Development Foundation Projects, LLC Series founded to enable current and next-generation map products by creating reliable, easy-to-use, and interoperable open map data. This interoperable map is the basis for extensibility, enabling companies to contribute their own data. Members will combine resources to build map data that is complete, accurate, and refreshed as the physical world changes. Map data will be open and extensible by all under an open data license.

For more information, read the press release or contact info@overturemaps.org.

Registration is now open for the Joint Development Foundation and Linux Foundation’s “Getting Started with Community Spec” webinar on November 15. The Community Specification License and Framework is a lightweight, open source standardization path that makes it easy to start specification development projects quickly and correctly in developer-friendly, git-based platforms. Standards Community Architect, Joaquin Prado, and LF VP of Standards, Jory Burson, will host the session.

Register Now to attend or receive updates.