Marks industry first as IBM offers POWER technology for open development
SAN FRANCISCO, USA: Google, IBM, Mellanox, NVIDIA and Tyan
announced plans to form the OpenPOWER Consortium - an open development
alliance based on IBM's POWER microprocessor architecture.
The Consortium intends to build advanced server, networking, storage
and GPU-acceleration technology aimed at delivering more choice, control
and flexibility to developers of next-generation, hyperscale and cloud
data centers.
The move makes POWER hardware and software available to open
development for the first time as well as making POWER IP licensable to
others, greatly expanding the ecosystem of innovators on the platform.
The consortium will offer open-source POWER firmware, the software that
controls basic chip functions. By doing this, IBM and the consortium can
offer unprecedented customization in creating new styles of server
hardware for a variety of computing workloads.
"The founding members of the OpenPOWER Consortium represent the next
generation in data-center innovation," said Steve Mills, senior VP and
group executive, IBM Software & Systems. "Combining our talents and
assets around the POWER architecture can greatly increase the rate of
innovation throughout the industry. Developers now have access to an
expanded and open set of server technologies for the first time. This
type of ‘collaborative development' model will change the way data
center hardware is designed and deployed."
"We are happy taking part in the OpenPOWER Consortium and its mission
to further accelerate the rate of innovation, performance and
efficiency for advanced data center solutions," said Gilad Shainer, VP
of marketing at Mellanox Technologies. "Open source and community
development are key to enabling innovative computer platforms and better
serve the scalable and emerging applications in the areas of
high-performance, Web 2.0 and cloud computing. Mellanox's mission is to
provide the most efficient interconnect solution for all compute and CPU
architectures and deliver the highest return-on-investment to our
users."
As part of their initial collaboration within the consortium, NVIDIA
and IBM will work together to integrate the CUDA GPU and POWER
ecosystems.
"The OpenPOWER Consortium brings together an ecosystem of hardware,
system software, and enterprise applications that will provide powerful
computing systems based on NVIDIA GPUs and POWER CPUs," said Sumit
Gupta, general manager of the Tesla Accelerated Computing Business at
NVIDIA.
"OpenPOWER will bring a new wave of innovation to next-generation
data centers," said Albert Mu, general manager of Tyan Computer and vice
president of MiTAC International Corp. "A strong ecosystem built around
OpenPOWER will bring a range of new technology choices to market,
offering more capabilities for Tyan's customers."
OpenPOWER is open to any firm that wants to innovate on the POWER platform and participate in an open, collaborative effort.
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