The Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) has joined the OpenPOWER Foundation. The news will be part of a keynote address by BSC Director, Mateo Valero at the OpenPOWER Summit Europe, which takes place this week in Barcelona.
We feel honored to become a member of the OpenPOWER Foundation”, explains Mateo Valero. “Working closely with the OpenPOWER community will give us the opportunity to collaborate with other leading institutions in high performance architectures, programming models and applications”, he adds.
The OpenPOWER Foundation is a not-for-profit open development community based on the POWER microprocessor architecture.
With the decision to become part of the OpenPOWER Foundation, BSC joins a growing roster of technology organizations working collaboratively to build advanced server, networking, storage and acceleration technology, as well as industry leading open source software, aimed at delivering more choice, control and flexibility to developers of next-generation, hyperscale and cloud data centers. The OpenPOWER Foundation makes POWER hardware and software available for open development, as well as making POWER intellectual property licensable to others, greatly expanding the ecosystem of innovators on the platform.
Within the OpenPOWER Foundation, BSC has a special interest in working in the areas of high performance computing, deep learning and precision medicine, says the BSC senior researcher Miquel Moretó, who will be the local technical contact with the OpenPOWER Foundation. “BSC will actively participate in the different working groups in OpenPOWER with the idea to share our experiences with the other members and influence the design of future systems based on the POWER architecture”, he adds.
The BSC will start its activity with the OpenPOWER Foundation, with a keynote address to the European Summit by the center’s director Mateo Valero, who will explain the work undertaken within the BSC and IBM-Research Deep Learning Center. In this joint research center, BSC and IBM collaborate on research and development projects in the Deep Learning domain, an essential component of cognitive computing, with a focus on the development of new algorithms to improve and expand the cognitive capabilities of deep learning systems. Additionally, the center will also conduct research on flexible computing architectures –fundamental for big data workloads– like data centric systems and applications. Valero’s address will be hosted by IBM’s Vice President, HPC and OpenPOWER, Dave Turek.