Today the OpenPOWER Foundation announced more than 50 new open innovations to help companies better solve grand challenges around big data. As a global, open development membership organization formed to facilitate and inspire collaborative innovation on the POWER architecture, OpenPOWER members share expertise, investment and server-class intellectual property to develop solutions that serve the evolving needs of technology customers.
Many new community innovations unveiled today adhere to the Open Compute Project reference architecture.
“Our ongoing work with the OpenPOWER Foundation is a natural extension of our commitment to open collaboration and innovation in data center technology,” said Amber Graner, Director of Operations, Community Manager, Open Compute Project. “Open Compute Project is focused on efficiency, flexibility, and openness—and we recognize the importance of the POWER processor and the robust OpenPOWER ecosystem for the future of sever design.”
IBM expands its Linux-only portfolio leveraging OpenPOWER innovation
IBM announced that it plans to add systems to its LC line of servers. The LC line, launched in October of 2015, infuses OpenPOWER technology into IBM’s scale-out server lineup. As a result of dozens of proof of concepts in areas like hyperscale data centers, high performance computing and large enterprises, IBM intends to make the following additions to the LC line, aimed at helping clients on the path to becoming cognitive businesses and furthering IBM’s commitment to open and collaborative innovation:
- IBM intends to add Open Compute Project-compliant systems to its Power Systems LC portfolio to support big data analytics and cognitive applications in the cloud. This is in addition to three other OpenPOWER Foundation members that recently announced plans for Open Compute Project-compliant, OpenPOWER systems: Mark III Systems, Penguin Computing and Stack Velocity.
- SUPERMICRO is currently developing two new POWER-based servers for IBM. The systems are based on the company’s “Ultra” architecture and IBM intends to add them to the LC server line to add further design options. The two systems — a storage rich 2 socket, 2U design and a dense 2 socket, 1U design – will be POWER-based, GPU and CAPI acceleration enabled and fine-tuned for cloud and cognitive workloads
- IBM, in collaboration with NVIDIA and Wistron, plans to release its second-generation OpenPOWER high performance computing server, which includes support for the NVIDIA Tesla Accelerated Computing platform. The server will leverage POWER8 processors connected directly to the new NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPU accelerators via the NVIDIA NVLink high-speed interconnect technology. Early systems will be available in Q4 2016. Additionally IBM and NVIDIA plan to create global acceleration labs to help developers and ISVs port applications on the POWER8 and NVIDIA NVLink based platform.
