Technology giants Google, IBM, Rackspace, and Suzhou PowerCore joined more than 100 other organizations at the OpenPOWER Summit to unveil new hardware solutions. The hardware innovations span systems, boards, and cards, and a new microprocessor customized for China. Built by OpenPower members, the new solutions leverage the POWER architecture to provide more choice, customization, and performance to customers, including hyperscale data centers.
The OpenPOWER Foundation, which is a collaboration of technologists supporting the adoption of an open server architecture for computer data centers, has grown to more than 110 businesses, organizations, and individuals across 22 countries. IBM’s POWER architecture is the cornerstone of innovation for the OpenPOWER Foundation.
“Since our first public event just under 1 year ago, the OpenPOWER Foundation has expanded dramatically and enabled the development of a new breed of data center technology products worldwide,” said Gordon MacKean, OpenPOWER Foundation Chair. “Through our members’ individual and collective efforts we are positively changing the game, delivering innovations that advance data center technology, expand choice and drive market efficiency.”
Among the more than 10 products and prototypes unveiled by OpenPOWER members were a prototype of IBM’s first OpenPOWER high performance computing server jointly developed by IBM and Wistron using technology from NVIDIA and Mellanox; the first commercially available OpenPOWER server, the TYAN TN71-BP012, planned for availability in the second quarter of 2015, which is designed for large-scale cloud deployments; the first GPU-accelerated OpenPOWER developer platform, the Cirrascale RM4950, which is the result of collaboration between NVIDIA, Tyan and Cirrascale; and an open server design and prototype motherboard, combining OpenPOWER and Open Compute design concepts and targeted to run OpenStack services and be deployed in Rackspace data centers.
Other member-developed solutions leverage Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface (CAPI), a unique feature built into the POWER architecture. OpenPOWER Foundation members also spotlighted products under development in China, where the OpenPOWER ecosystem is providing Chinese technology companies the option to build custom solutions and accelerate local innovation.
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