SAN FRANCISCO, April 23, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Open Innovation
Summit -- The OpenPOWER Foundation, an open development community
dedicated to accelerating data center innovation, today took its
first steps to deliver transformative system designs based on IBM's
new POWER8 processor.
At the Open Innovation Summit today, with over 100 leading
industry executives and technologists on hand, the Foundation
showed the first reference board and OEM systems, and innovations
including many forms of acceleration, advanced memory and
networking. OpenPOWER has grown to more than two dozen members
including global hardware and software thought leaders.
Formed by Google, IBM, Mellanox Technologies, NVIDIA, and Tyan,
the Foundation makes POWER hardware and software available for open
development, as well as POWER intellectual property licensable to
other manufacturers. OpenPOWER is greatly expanding the ecosystem
of innovators providing value back to the industry and end
users.
"We are very pleased with the growth of the OpenPOWER community
and the progress made by the Working Group members even at this
early stage," said Gordon MacKean,
Chairman, OpenPOWER Foundation. "The projects feeding the
innovation pipeline to date will greatly enhance the performance of
the next generation of servers by eliminating system-level
bottlenecks."
Initial OpenPOWER Designs
At the summit, the OpenPOWER Foundation presented its first
white box server details including a development and reference
design from Tyan, and firmware and operating system developed by
IBM, Google, and Canonical. The OpenPOWER Software stack in this
white box design is targeted for ease of implementation in hybrid
deployments. IBM noted it will be deploying systems leveraging this
OpenPOWER hardware and software stack in SoftLayer later this year.
Information on OpenPOWER projects is available on the Foundation's
new web site, www.openpowerfoundation.org.
Example Innovative Solutions
OpenPOWER also announced new ways to use POWER-based
technologies to address critical big data, cloud, and application
challenges facing modern data centers. These innovations target
removal of system-level bottlenecks leveraging partner technologies
along with advanced POWER8 interfaces such as CAPI. An early live
demonstration of these innovations will be performed at the IBM
Impact 2014 Global Conference, Las Vegas
Nevada, April 27 –
May 1. These include:
- Mellanox RDMA exploitation on POWER – Using RDMA a 10X
throughput and latency improvement of Key Value Store applications
was described. These capabilities will be further accelerated with
future exploitation of POWER8 capabilities.
- NVIDIA GPU Accelerators – NVIDIA is adding CUDA software
support for NVIDIA GPUs with IBM POWER CPUs. IBM and NVIDIA are
demonstrating the first GPU accelerator framework for Java, showing
an order of magnitude performance improvement on Hadoop Analytics
applications compared to a CPU-only implementation. NVIDIA will
offer its NVLink™ high-speed GPU interconnect as a licensed
technology to OpenPOWER Foundation members.
- Xilinx and Altera FPGA accelerators with CAPI attach –
IBM described two CAPI attach accelerator solutions, a memcached
Key Value Store showing a 35X power/performance improvement with an
order of magnitude latency reduction, and Monte Carlo financial instruments models with
a 200X speedup using Altera FPGAs with a CAPI attach.
- Micron, Samsung Electronics, and SK Hynix memory – Each
of these innovative memory companies is committed to supporting the
OpenPower Foundation through the supply of more advanced memory and
storage components for an open ecosystem.
New OpenPOWER Foundation Members
Twenty-five members have joined OpenPOWER including Canonical,
Samsung Electronics, Micron, Hitachi, Emulex, Fusion-IO, SK Hynix,
Xilinx, Julich Supercomputer Center, Oregon
State University, and several others since OpenPOWER formed
as a legal entity in December
2013.
About OpenPOWER Foundation
The goal of the OpenPOWER Foundation is to create an open
ecosystem, using the POWER Architecture to share expertise,
investment, and server-class intellectual property to serve the
evolving needs of customers.
- OpenPOWER enables collaborative innovation for shared building
blocks
- OpenPOWER supports independent innovation by members
- OpenPOWER builds on industry leading technology
- OpenPOWER thrives as an open development community
For further details, a full membership roster, and getting
involved in the OpenPOWER Foundation, visit
www.openpowerfoundation.org.
Contact:
Calista Redmond
Director, Business Development
OpenPOWER Foundation
Email membership@open-power.org
Phone 720-396-4384
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SOURCE IBM