Facebook Thursday set up a non-profit foundation to run its six-month-old Open Compute Project (OCP) aimed at defining the cheapest and most efficient massively web-scale infrastructure possible using the open source model.

Its first OCP data center in Prineville, Oregon, managed a 38% increase in energy efficiency for 24% less than other Facebook facilities cost. The idea is to push the envelope.

The Open Compute Foundation (OCF) is reportedly well enough funded to start. There is a board of directors. Hardware designs and source files will be published, IP contributed and many eyes will look for ways to improve the standard à la Linux. The idea is to speed innovation by commoditizing the baser elements.

Facebook, of course, released the designs for the homegrown servers it builds for its massive data centers back in April. It's now opening up its data centers to qualified hardware designers and hackers, sharing the specs of its new yet-to-be-built hydroelectrically powered data center in Sweden and releasing a new three-rack-wide Open Rack 1.0 specification that reportedly uses cross-connected arrays of hard or flash disks.

There are specs on motherboards, power supplies, chassis, the triple rack and electrical and mechanical designs on the OCP site at http://opencompute.org/specs/.

Details trickled out of the web-cast OCP Summit Facebook held in New York. Initially it looks like Intel, ASUS, Dell, Mellanox, Huawei, Red Hat, Cloudera, Synnex and its manufacturing arm Hyve Solutions, Silicon Mechanics, Nebula, Baidu, Mozilla, Rackspace, NTT Data, Goldman Sachs, Georgia Tech, North Carolina State University and CERN are in. No sign of Google, Microsoft or IBM.

ASUS is supposed to open source its motherboard designs and Mellanox said it has OCP-compliant 10GbE mezzanine cards.

Red Hat will certify RHEL on two systems based on the OCP spec and plans to test and certify its virtualization and newly acquired storage technologies at some point.

Hyve is providing early samples and discounted units of the latest "vanity-free" OCP server products.

The initial motherboards used Westmere chips; OCP 2.0 is based on Sandy Bridge promising technologies that wouldn't be available otherwise until Q2.

Board members include Sun and Arista co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim (although networking's not included yet), Goldman Sachs global technology infrastructure chief Don Duet, Rackspace COO Mark Roenig and Intel Data Center Group high-density computing general manager Jason Waxman.

Facebook's director of technical operations Frank Frankovsky will be executive director. OCF is supposed to be modeled on the Apache Foundation.

The board is supposed to charter the projects, appoint Project Committee chairs, and approve specifications. The Incubation Committee will manage new Projects and report to the board. Facebook would reportedly like to see storage at vast scale addressed.