OpenPOWER Accelerates Open Innovation with New Member Products and Free Development Cloud

Global Tech Leaders Collaborating to Propel World’s Only Open Enterprise Server

OpenPOWER China Summit, Beijing, China, June 10, 2015 – The OpenPOWER Foundation today announced new solutions, expanded membership and free-of-charge cloud services for developers to advance open innovation in hyperscale data centers to better meet the growing demand for alternatives to commodity servers.

Formed in December 2013 to facilitate open development of the POWER processor architecture, the OpenPOWER Foundation has grown to more than 130 members worldwide supporting and delivering a wide range of new POWER-based products.

“As the desire for alternatives to x86-based servers increases around the world, OpenPOWER’s members are actively teaming together to drive design innovation and develop differentiated products,” said Brad McCredie, OpenPOWER Foundation President and IBM Fellow. “Our rapidly expanding OpenPOWER ecosystem is delivering much-needed choice and price-performance advantaged solutions for the technology industry.”

Member product announcements include:

• New CAPI acceleration development kit from Alpha Data – Leveraging Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface (CAPI), a unique feature built into the POWER architecture, Alpha Data today announced the availability of a CAPI acceleration development kit co-developed with fellow OpenPOWER member Xilinx. The kit enables system designers and programmers leveraging hardware acceleration to utilize Xilinx All Programmable FPGA devices attached to CAPI on IBM® POWER8™ systems and OpenPOWER member-branded POWER8™ systems.

• General availability of CP1 processor – Suzhou PowerCore Technology Co., Ltd. announced general availability of CP1, the first POWER chip for the China market which was first introduced at the inaugural OpenPOWER Summit in March. Customers may begin placing orders today. Zoom Netcom’s RedPOWER servers will be the first to incorporate CP1 into its design.

• General Availability of Tyan OpenPOWER Systems – Tyan’s previously sold out TYAN GN70-BP010 OpenPOWER customer reference systems is available for immediate shipment at a price of $2850 USD. Additionally, Tyan is now taking orders for the TYAN TN71-BP012, Tyan’s OpenPOWER server designed for large-scale cloud deployments. The estimated ship date is August.

“SuperVessel” OpenPOWER Development Cloud To further support open research and development on top of the POWER architecture, IBM today announced SuperVessel, a first-of-its-kind 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.

SuperVessel is based on POWER processors, incorporates GPUs and Xilinx FPGAs to provide heterogeneous acceleration, and uses OpenStack to manage the whole cloud.

To date, SuperVessel has attracted thousands of users in the past six months, including developers from the open source community and students from more than 30 universities in China and around the world. OpenPOWER ecosystem partners can leverage SuperVessel to speed up their application development.

OpenPOWER Design for Open Data Center Committee Last week IBM announced it joined China’s Open Data Center Committee (ODCC), a consortium of leading Chinese technology providers creating new server specifications for hyperscale data centers. IBM has begun working closely with several fellow OpenPOWER members to develop an ODCC compliant system based on the OpenPOWER design concept which leverages the POWER architecture.

OpenPOWER members intend to combine their extensive system design experience and differentiated technologies to develop powerful, new, cost efficient servers for some of the world’s largest data centers.

Continued Membership Growth The membership base of the OpenPOWER Foundation has grown rapidly in roughly a year and a half. What started in December 2013 with five founders – Google, IBM, NVDIA, Mellanox and Tyan – is now a diverse community of more than 130 members representing leading technology companies, academic institutions and researchers located in 22 countries across six continents. Some of the most recent additions include NEC, Penguin Computing and the University of California. A list of current members is available at https://openpowerfoundation.org/membership/current-members.

About the OpenPOWER Foundation The OpenPOWER Foundation is a global, open development membership organization formed to facilitate and inspire collaborative innovation on the POWER architecture. OpenPOWER members share expertise, investment and server-class intellectual property to develop solutions that serve the evolving needs of technology customers.

The OpenPOWER Foundation enables members to customize POWER CPU processors, system platforms, firmware and middleware software for optimization for their business and organizational needs. Member innovations delivered and under development include custom systems for large scale data centers, workload acceleration through GPU, FPGA or advanced I/O, and platform optimization for software appliances, or advanced hardware technology exploitation.

For further details visit www.openpowerfoundation.org.

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Media Contact

Abby Schoffman Text100, for the OpenPOWER Foundation abby.schoffman@text100.com 212.871.3928