By Rich Ptak
The first ever OpenPOWER
European Summit opened in Barcelona this week. With over 270 members
worldwide (60 in Europe), the OpenPOWER Foundation continues to grow and win
over developers and users for the OpenPOWER Platform.
With the demise of Moore’s Law[1], IBM
believed that the performance demands of computing with dense databases, extensive
virtualization, container environments, etc., can best be met with
workload-tuned systems. In that vein, in September, IBM announced three new POWER8-based
systems. Sessions at IBM’s Edge 2016 event and an early peek last summer at the
next gen POWER9 chips, indicate a platform attracting considerable attention with
increasing support and use.
The systems are used by a number of OpenPOWER Foundation
members. For example, IBM Power S822LC for High Performance Computing (HPC) is
used by Turkey’s SC3 Electronics to create the largest HPC cluster in the
Middle East and Africa. For Germany’s Human Brain Project, the Power S822LC for
HPC, is the pilot system in a part of a Pre-Commercial Procurement process for
the JURON supercomputer at the Jurlich Supercomputing Center.
System and chip specifics are covered in our blogs. The new
systems: “The
newest IBM Power Systems – more of everything for the hottest environments![2]”, and the
chip in: “Acceleration,
Collaboration, Innovation - IBM's roadmap for its POWER architecture[3]”.
Why OpenPOWER?
What’s behind OpenPOWER popularity? In a nutshell, in sharp
distinction from other vendors, IBM and OpenPOWER Foundation members believe
that workload and task specific systems, fully optimized for dominant computer
tasks, such as handling and processing Big Data, High Performance Computing,
compute-intensive, Commercial computing, etc. provide the best way today’s
requirements of IT developers and operations staffs. IBM also recognized the
power of open, collaborating communities to rapidly develop and deliver leading
edge products.
IBM and the OpenPOWER community form a unique combination that
facilitates and speeds innovation to deliver the power and functionality of rapid
calculations of sophisticated analytics and manipulation of massive amounts of
data needed for practical application of the compute intensive machine
learning, deep learning, autonomous device, cutting edge research and development
efforts underway today.
The OpenPOWER Community believes the widest range of
enhancements, extensions and advancements will result from extensive
collaboration around a fully open architecture and standards-driven technology.
The OpenPOWER platform and the OpenPOWER Foundation are joined by the recently
(October) announced OpenCAPI Consortium[4]. The
goal of the consortium is to fully standardize CAPI[5] as an
Open Interface Architecture that allows any microprocessor to attach to
accelerators, advanced memory, networking and storage devices. It is faster,
easier and less expensive than traditional approaches.
OpenPOWER in Europe
The European summit detailed member-driven innovation and
extensions with a range of special-purpose accelerators and enhancements using
the OpenPOWER platform. In addition to those mentioned earlier, Spain’s Barcelona
Supercomputing Center (BSC) is collaborating with IBM -BSC Deep Learning Center
to improve and expand algorithms for deep learning systems. See Figure 1
(below) for more OpenPower platform activities in Europe and the UK.
Figure 1 European OpenPOWER ecosystem growing
Key to the success of the OpenPower platform is acceptance
in the Dev/Ops world. A partial list of OpenPOWER developer
resources and events from around the world include:
- A European developer cloud – A collaborative effort between the Technical University of Munich at the Department of Informatics; plans are to launch Supervessel, a European R&D by the end of 2016. Similar to a Chinese effort, Supervessel is a cloud built on POWER’s open architecture and technologies to provide open remote access to ecosystem developers and university students.
- CAPI SNAP Framework – Is a collaborative effort by North American and European OpenPOWER Foundation members to make FPGA acceleration technology easier to implement and more accessible to the worldwide developer community. A beta version is available now.
- OpenPOWER READY FPGA Accelerator Boards – Alpha Data showcased its low latency, low power, OpenPOWER READY compliant FPGA accelerator boards for applications requiring high-throughput processing and software acceleration.
- OpenPOWER Developer Challenge Winners – some 300 developers competed in the first OpenPOWER Developer Challenge, the four Grand Prize winners announced are:
- Emergency Prediction on Spark:
Antonio Carlos Furtado (University of Alberta) predicts Seattle emergency
call volumes with Deep Learning on OpenPOWER;
- TensorFlow Cancer Detection:
Altoros Labs brings a turbo boost to automated cancer detection with
OpenPOWER;
- ArtNet
Genre Classifier: Praveen Sridhar and Pranav
Sridhar turn OpenPOWER into an art connoisseur; and
- Scaling Up and Out a Bioinformatics Algorithm:
Delft University of Technology advances precision medicine by scaling up
and out on OpenPOWER.
The OpenPOWER ecosystem continues to
grow and add members in the UK, Europe and around the globe. Europe’s 60
members today could double in the next 12 months as leading edge companies (of
all sizes) have access to the right platform with the right capabilities for
rapid innovation in operations, accelerators, networking, storage and software.
The Final Word
While
generic servers aren’t going to disappear any time soon, the OpenPOWER platform
and associated technologies clearly address previously unmet needs of developer
and operations communities operating at the leading edge of technology and its
application. These teams are tackling some of the biggest and most demanding
problems and challenging applications that being addressed today. And, more and
more of them are finding the OpenPOWER ecosystem supportive of the innovative
thinking they demand.
One more
observation, OpenPower System architecture isn’t just for the R&D and cutting
edge teams. Numerous companies use the technology in a range of situations. The
basic strategy is to extend the system capabilities and lower technological
barriers to access using creative collaboration to make innovation and
leveraging emerging technologies easier. We think they along with their
partners are succeeding.
We encourage you to follow the links provided to find out
more about what is happening with OpenPOWER
Systems[6],
the OpenPOWER Foundation[7] and the OpenPOWER
ecosystem as it expands around the world. platform and associated enhancements find considerable application in research
and operations.
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