We’re Attending the OpenPOWER Developer Congress — Here’s Why You Should, Too. Insights from Nimbix, Mellanox, and Xilinx

Prominent OpenPOWER Foundation members have provided the reasons they’re taking time out of their busy days to support the OpenPOWER Developer Congress and send their experts and team members.

This is why YOU should attend too!

Nimbix Enables On-Demand Cloud for Developers

Why Nimbix is Participating in the OpenPOWER Developer Congress

As the leading public cloud provider for OpenPOWER and Power systems, Nimbix has embraced its role as a member in the OpenPOWER Foundation. Nimbix enables ISVs to get their applications ported and running on the Power architecture, and feels a responsibility to help the OpenPOWER community. This is what the company signed up for when it became a Silver-level member of the OpenPOWER Foundation.

Nimbix works to grow the Power ecosystem for application software and broaden the software portfolio on OpenPOWER. It facilitates this by:

• Providing ISVs and developers a Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipeline to deploy their source code on Power.
• Providing the ability to not just port, but to test at scale, on a supercomputer in the cloud that runs on OpenPOWER technology.
• Enabling ISVs that decide to go to market with their applications in the cloud to sell those applications directly in the Nimbix cloud.

What is Nimbix Bringing to the Developer Congress?

“Nimbix is proud to support the OpenPOWER Developer Congress by providing resources to support Congress activities,” said Leo Reiter, CTO of Nimbix. “Through our support, we will be enabling the on-demand cloud infrastructure for the Congress so that all of the sessions and tracks can do their development in the cloud on the OpenPOWER platform.”

Leo will be part of the team instructing cloud development and porting to Power tracks at the Congress. “As an OpenPOWER Foundation member,” Leo said,, “I will be working with participants to get their applications running on Power in the cloud and providing them with tips and tools they can use to continue developing OpenPOWER applications post-conference.”

[caption id=“attachment_4790” align=“aligncenter” width=“880”] Click here to register for the OpenPOWER Developer Congress - May 22-25 in San Francisco.[/caption]

Mellanox Educates on Caffe, Chainer, and TensorFlow

Why Mellanox is Participating in the OpenPOWER Developer Congress

Mellanox is not only a founding member of the OpenPOWER Foundation, but also a founding member of its Machine Learning Work Group.  AI / cognitive computing will improve our quality of life, drive emerging markets, and surely play a leading role in global economics. But to achieve real scalable performance with AI, being able to leverage cutting-edge interconnect capabilities is paramount. Typical vanilla networking just doesn’t scale, so it’s important that developers are aware of the additional performance that can be achieved by understanding the critical role of the network.

Because Deep Learning applications are well-suited to exploit the POWER architecture, it is also extremely important to have an advanced network that unlocks the scalable performance of deep learning systems, and that is where the Mellanox interconnect comes in. The benefits of RDMA, ultra-low latency, and In-Network Computing deliver an optimal environment for data-ingest at the critical performance levels required by POWER-based systems.

Mellanox is committed to working with the industry’s thought leaders to drive technologies in the most open way. Its core audience has always been end users — understanding their challenges and working with them to deliver real solutions. Today, more than ever, the developers, data-centric architects, and data scientists are the new generation of end users that drive the data center. They are defining the requirements of the data center, establishing its performance metrics, and delivering the fastest time to solution by exploiting the capabilities of the OpenPOWER architecture.  Mellanox believes that participating in the OpenPOWER Developer Congress gives the company an opportunity to educate developers on its state-of-art-networking and also demonstrates its commitment to innovation with open development and open standards.

What is Mellanox Bringing to the Developer Congress?

Mellanox will provide on-site expertise to discuss the capabilities of Mellanox Interconnect Solutions. Dror Goldenberg, VP of Software Architecture at Mellanox, will be present to further dive into areas of machine learning acceleration and the frameworks that already take advantage of Mellanox capabilities, such as Caffe, Chainer, TensorFlow, and others.

Mellanox is the interconnect leader in AI / cognitive computing data centers, and already accelerates machine learning frameworks to achieve from 2x to 18x speedup for image recognition, NLP, voice recognition, and more. The company’s goal is to assist developers with their applications to achieve maximum scalability on POWER-based systems.

Xilinx Offers Experts in FPGAs and Machine Learning Algorithms

Why Xilinx is Participating in the OpenPOWER Developer Congress?

Xilinx, as a Platinum-level member of the OpenPOWER Foundation, looks forward to supporting the Foundation’s outreach activities. The company particularly likes the format of the upcoming OpenPOWER Developer Congress, because it’s focused on developers and provides many benefits developers will find helpful.

Xilinx appreciates the unique nature of the Congress, in that it provides developers the opportunity to get up close to the technology and in some cases, work on it directly. It also allows developers to make good connections with other companies who participate in the Congress — something that can be very beneficial as they return to their day-to-day work.

Companies that choose to participate by providing instruction at the Congress get an opportunity to talk with developers first hand, and receive feedback on their product offerings. Conversely, the developers have an opportunity to provide feedback on products and influence what platforms (everything OpenPOWER) are going to look like as they mature.

What is Xilinx bringing to the Developer Congress?

Xilinx will be bringing system architects and solution architects who will work hands-on with developers to create solutions and solve problems. These experts understand both FPGAs and machine learning algorithms, which fits nicely with the OpenPOWER Developer Congress agenda.