OpenPower Shows Off at European Summit

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The IBM-led OpenPower consortium heads to Europe with a first summit held in the continent-- one revealing collaborations in France, Germany, Spain and Turkey, as well as the launch of Supervessel Europe.

Openpower summit Held in Barcelona, Spain, the inaugural summit hosted the unveiling of OpenPower-based offerings designed to improve the performance of workloads including AI, deep learning, analytics and high-performance computing (HPC). It also detailed efforts to ensure IBM hardware is not the only alternative to Intel in the datacentre. These include the CAPI SNAP Framework (a co-development designed to make the implementation of FPGA acceleration technology easier, now available in beta) and a demo of OpenPower-ready FPGA accelerator boards by UK-based Alpha Data.

"Commodity platforms are proving ineffective when it comes to ingesting and making sense of the 2.5 billion GBs of data being created daily," OpenPower Foundation president Calista Redmond says. "With today's announcements by our European members, the OpenPower Foundation expands its reach, bringing open-source, high-performing, flexible and scalable solutions to organizations worldwide."

As for the aforementioned collaborations in European countries, the French GENCI (Grand Equipement National pour le Calcul Intensif) research facility will be using OpenPower technology. Germany will host a pilot supercomputer called Juron, a design by IBM, Nvidia and the Juelich Supercomputing Centre donated to the Human Brain Project.

In Spain, the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (BSC) will use OpenPower technology at the IBM-BSC Deep Learning Centre, while in TUrkey the SC3 Electronics supercomputing centre is building a large HPC cluster based on IBM OpenPower LC servers.

The final announcement involves Supervessel Europe-- a European arm of the development cloud powered by OpenPower members and the Technical University of Munich. The cloud delivers open remote access to supercomputing capabilities for developers and students, and should launch by end 2016.

Go OpenPower Summit Europe