OpenPOWER Foundation Accelerates Developer Adoption at OpenPOWER Summit Europe

More than 250 industry leaders and OpenPOWER Foundation members registered and are convening today at the OpenPOWER Summit Europe 2018 in Amsterdam. The two-day, developer-centric event themed “Open the Future” includes sessions on technologies like PCIe Gen4, CAPI, OpenCAPI, Linux, FPGA, Power Architecture and more.

Front and center at OpenPOWER Summit Europe is the Talos II developer workstation by Raptor Computing Systems. The first POWER9 developer workstation, the Talos II will enable more developers to begin working on Power technology due to its affordable price point.

Artem Ikoev, c-founder and CTO of Yadro, one of the OpenPOWER Foundation’s newest Platinum members, will also speak at OpenPOWER Summit Europe. According to Ikoev, “The openness of the OpenPOWER Foundation enables collaboration among industry leaders as well as emerging vendors, resulting in pioneering products.”

“European interest in OpenPOWER has grown consistently and now comprises close to 25 percent of our membership,” said Hugh Blemings, executive director, OpenPOWER Foundation. “Computing infrastructure, artificial intelligence, security and analytics are all areas where our European members are bringing innovative solutions to the forefront.”

OpenPOWER Summit Europe Hackathons

OpenPOWER Summit Europe attendees will have a chance to participate in two hands-on hackathons.

The OpenBMC hackathon will provide participants with a complete understanding of the fundamentals of OpenBMC including development, build environment and service management. Planned exercises will cover kernel updates, initial application development, web user interface customization and support system integration.

The AI4Good hackathon empowers participants to use their coding skills to help others. Teams will compete to build predictive machine learning and deep learning models to help detect the risk of lung tumors.

OpenPOWER Growth in Europe

Representatives from a number of OpenPOWER Foundation member organizations attended Summit Europe 2018 to share how they’re using Power to Open the Future. Highlights include:

• To assist with the monumental task of collecting data generated by their large hadron collider (LHC), CERN is evaluating POWER9-based OpenPOWER systems to capture the 5 terabytes of data generated each second by the LHC. POWER9’s industry-leading IO features can help drive differentiated performance for the FPGA cards that CERN uses to capture the data.
• Based on blockchain technology and decentralized networks with democratic oversight, Vereign adds integrity, authenticity and privacy to identity, data and collaboration. “Such federated networks of user-controlled clouds require performance, transparency and the ability to add strong hardware-based cryptography. OpenPOWER is the only platform that gives us all three in combination with a vibrant ecosystem of further innovation to further improve our solution, said Georg Greve, co-founder and president, Vereign AG.
• Brytlyt works with companies to solve the challenge of analyzing billions of rows of data at “the speed of thought” by indexing, joining and aggregating data with its GPU database.
• Leveraging OpenPOWER enabled E4 to build and integrate a chain of components that enable its A.V.I.D.E supercomputer to achieve increased energy efficiency.
• Inspur Power Systems strives to build a new generation of OpenPOWER server products for data center servers facing the “cloud intelligence” era. The company has released three OpenPOWER servers this year including its Enterprise General Platform, Commercial Computing Platform and Facing HPC and AI Platform.
• Delft University is working to create next generation OpenPOWER computing systems to achieve the best performance for the target application. In collaboration with IBM, the organization is working to accelerate DNA analysis on FPGAs using CAPI with a goal of creating an end-to-end DNA analysis solution that is easily scalable and delivers high speed.

As organizations collaborate on new solutions and more developers begin to build on Power, the OpenPOWER Foundation expects continued growth in Europe and around the world. For real time updates from the event, check out #OpenPOWERSummit on Twitter.