OpenPOWER Foundation Reveals New Servers
The OpenPOWER Foundation today revealed more than 50 new infrastructure and software technologies, spanning the entire system stack, including systems, boards, cards and accelerators. Unveiled at the second annual OpenPOWER Summit, the products 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.
Many new community innovations unveiled today are designed to be incorporated into the Open Compute Project product portfolio.
Google, a founding member of the OpenPOWER Foundation, announced today that it is developing a next-generation OpenPOWER and Open Compute Project form factor server. Google is working with Rackspace to co-develop an open server specification based on the new POWER9 architecture, and the two companies will submit a candidate server design to the Open Compute Project.
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 companys "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.