OpenPOWER Foundation Reveals New Servers and Big Data Analytics Innovations

April 6 — The OpenPOWER Foundation today revealed more than 50 new infrastructure and software innovations, spanning the entire system stack, including systems, boards, cards and accelerators. Unveiled at the second annual OpenPOWER Summit, these new products build upon 30 OpenPOWER-based solutions already in the marketplace.

“To meet the demands of today’s data centers, businesses need open system design that provides greater flexibility and speed at a lower cost,” said Calista Redmond, President of the OpenPOWER Foundation and Director of OpenPOWER Global Alliances, IBM. “The innovations introduced today demonstrate OpenPOWER members’ commitment to building technology infrastructures that provide customers with more choice, allowing them to leverage increased data workloads and analytics to drive better business outcomes.”

The OpenPOWER Foundation has rapidly grown to more than 200 businesses, organizations and individuals across 24 countries since it was formed two years ago. With the new innovations being announced today, the OpenPOWER Foundation continues to provide the technology and collaboration tools needed to deliver customized solutions and increased performance to customers, including hyperscale data centers and high performance computing organizations. OpenPOWER innovations are built upon by a growing community of more than 2,300 ISVs supporting Linux on POWER applications.

The products revealed by OpenPOWER members today highlight:

• New Servers for High Performance Computing and Cloud Deployments – Foundation members introduced more than 10 new OpenPOWER servers, offering expanded services for high performance computing and server virtualization.
  • Rackspace has announced that “Barreleye” has moved from the lab to the data center. Rackspace anticipates “Barreleye” will move into broader availability throughout the rest of the year, with the first applications on the Rackspace Public Cloud powered by OpenStack.
  • 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 (learn more). 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.
  • With planned availability in April, the TYAN GT75-BP012 is a 1U, POWER8-based server solution with the ppc64 architecture. The OpenPOWER-based platform offers exceptional capability for in-memory computing in a 1U implementation.
• Expanded use of CAPI for Acceleration Technology – Foundation members, including Bittware, IBM, Mellanox and Xilinx, unveiled more than a dozen new accelerator solutions based on the Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface (CAPI). Alpha Data also unveiled a Xilinx FPGA-based CAPI hardware card at the Summit. These new accelerator technologies leverage CAPI to provide performance, cost and power benefits when compared to application programs running on a core or custom acceleration implementation attached via non-coherent interfaces. This is a key differentiator in building infrastructure to accelerate computation of big data and analytics workloads on the POWER architecture.
• A Continued Commitment to Genomics Research – Following successful collaborations with LSU and tranSMART, OpenPOWER Foundation members continue to develop new advancements for genomics research. Today, Edico Genome announced the DRAGEN Genomics Platform, a new appliance that enables ultra-rapid analysis of genomic data, reducing the time to analyze an entire genome from hours to just minutes, allowing healthcare providers to identify patients at higher risk for cancer before conditions worsen. DRAGEN’s unprecedented speed is being leveraged to rapidly diagnose critically ill newborns, improve turnaround time for prenatal tests, and quickly identify infectious disease outbreaks.Developed in collaboration with Xilinx and IBM, the solution features Edico’s DRAGEN processor, which is based on Xilinx’s Virtex-7 980T FPGA, running on IBM Power Systems S822LC. The combination of the POWER CPU, high memory bandwidth and DRAGEN accelerated speed and high accuracy will allow clients, such as Rady Children’s Institute for Genomic Medicine of San Diego, to leverage advanced analytics in genomics and life sciences.

Additional information on the innovations announced today can be found in the OpenPOWER fact sheet.

About OpenPOWER Foundation

The OpenPOWER Foundation is 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.

The OpenPOWER Foundation enables members to customize POWER CPU processors, system platforms, firmware and middleware software for optimization for their business and organizational needs. Member innovations delivered and under development include custom systems for large scale data centers, workload acceleration through GPU, FPGA or advanced I/O, and platform optimization for software appliances, or advanced hardware technology exploitation.

For further details visit www.openpowerfoundation.org.

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Source: OpenPOWER Foundation