RISE took part in the OCP Global Summit 2026, in San Jose, where it announced its plan for a new initiative on open standards for a trustworthy AI compute continuum.
What is OCP and why it matters for HIGHER
The Open Compute Project (OCP) is a global community that develops open specifications for data centre hardware, from servers, racks and accelerators to power delivery, cooling and hardware management. Its designs are shared under open licences, so any organisation can build, adopt and improve them. OCP matters for HIGHER because the project builds heterogeneous cloud and edge infrastructure on European processor technologies that follow OCP standards. Aligning with OCP keeps HIGHER hardware interoperable with the wider ecosystem and gives European technology a direct route into a global market.
HIGHER’s Meta Operating System
Hardware alone does not make a continuum. AI workloads now span edge devices, cloud platforms and HPC systems, each with its own scheduler, security model and network policies. HIGHER therefore includes a Meta Operating System (Meta-OS) built on ColonyOS, the open-source meta-operating system developed by RISE and LTU.
The Meta-OS acts as a coordination layer above existing schedulers such as Kubernetes and Slurm. A workload is described once and runs on the most suitable resource, whether an edge device, a cloud cluster or an HPC system, across x86, Arm and RISC-V architectures. Executors, the programs that run jobs on each resource, pull cryptographically signed jobs under a zero-trust model, so coordination works across firewalls and administrative boundaries.
A new workstream in the OCP AI Compute Continuum Project
RISE has started discussions to establish a new workstream under the OCP AI Compute Continuum (AICC) Project. The workstream will define open standard features for a trustworthy agentic compute continuum. In simple terms, it focuses on four elements:
- A common hardware description
- Signed attestation records for every AI operation
- A unified interface between orchestrators and the trust layer (which is the relevance with HIGHER Project)
- Rules for edge sites that go offline
Announced at the OCP Global Summit
The initiative was announced at the OCP Global Summit 2026 in San Jose, in the panel “Bridging the AI Continuum: Trust, Orchestration, and Open Standards” on Tuesday 13 October.
Why European contributions matter
European participation in this initiative is essential. By writing the AICC best practices together, European organisations can shape the OCP recipe for the AI compute continuum and ensure that European technologies are ready when the global market adopts it. Organisations interested in contributing to or collaborating on this work are welcome to contact Çağatay Yılmaz at RISE (cagatay.yilmaz@ri.se).