IBM open software center for POWER7 dev

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IBM announced today that it has opened a new development center in Manchester that will emphasize optimization, security, and virtualization software for IBM’s Power systems

IBM center in ManchesterToday’s announcement is the latest in a series of major investments in IBM’s high-end systems in 2010.  The Manchester system software development laboratory follows similar investments in IBM’s manufacturing and development capabilities this year in Guadalajara, Mexico and Poughkeepskie, New York, in support of systems and storage solutions. The new facility currently supports local clients, such as the Daresbury Laboratory, and expects to support worldwide projects for international clients.

…Jonathan Follows at the Science and Technology Facilities Council’s Daresbury Laboratory said: “Daresbury’s Computational Science and Engineering Department looks to the future of high performance computing. We investigate advances in computer hardware and software and this enables us to develop applications which underpin innovation in, for example, areas such as aircraft design, drug development and weather forecasting. Systems such as POWER7 enable accurate models, predictions and forecasts to be generated on computers and thus can help to reduce the cost and time to develop new products. Daresbury Laboratory has been using IBM systems for many years, and POWER7 represents the latest incremental change. We will make our system available to UK academic users, including the University of Manchester.”

According to company, the lab originated from IBM’s acqusition of Transitive in 2009. Transitive was a company that spun out of the University of Manchester; Transitive’s software allowed applications developed for one platform to run on different platforms without recompilation (Apple used this software as the basis for its Rosetta environment during the transition from PowerPC to Intel, and SGI also distributed it during the transition from MIPS/IRIX to Itanium/Linux).