IBM has announced SuperVessel, an initiative that enables business partners, application developers and university students to conduct innovation, development and learning for the growing OpenPOWER ecosystem.
SuperVessel, an open access cloud service created by Beijing’s IBM Research and IBM Systems Labs, is now available to the global community of developers who want to participate in the OpenPOWER ecosystem. The cloud acts as a virtual R&D engine for the creation, testing and pilot of emerging applications including deep analytics, machine learning and the Internet of Things.
OpenPOWER ecosystem partners can leverage SuperVessel to speed up their application development. The cloud is based on POWER processors, with FPGAs and GPUs to provide heterogeneous acceleration service, and uses OpenStack to manage the whole cloud. SuperVessel is divided into online "labs" where users can access open source software, build and test applications and share experiences and best practices. The labs include big data, the Internet of Things, acceleration and virtualization on POWER.
SuperVessel has attracted thousands of users in the past 6 months, including developers from the open source community and students from more than 30 universities in China and around the world.