OpenPOWER Developer Challenge Finalists Announced
Published on Saturday 1 October 2016
By Calista Redmond, President, OpenPOWER Foundation
Recently at IBM Edge I had the pleasure of announcing the Finalists of the 2016 OpenPOWER Developer Challenge. From the kick-off of this global challenge in the Spring – a first-ever for the OpenPOWER Foundation – to the many MeetUps and Google Hangouts where we met Developers and Challenge participants around the world, it’s been a fantastic journey, and it’s not over yet.
Hundreds of Developer Challenge participants worked throughout the summer using the SuperVessel Developer Cloud to port, optimize, accelerate and scale HPC, Big Data & Analytics and Deep Learning applications on OpenPOWER. They had access to hardware acceleration technologies including NVIDIA GPUs and FPGAs from Xilinx, advanced development tools and programming frameworks including the IBM XL Compilers and the Linux on Power SDK, and programming frameworks like Apache Spark and the OpenPOWER Deep Learning Software Distribution.
The six projects qualifying as Finalists are:
- Emergency Prediction on Spark: Antonio Carlos Furtado from the University of Alberta predicts Seattle emergency call volumes with Deep Learning on OpenPOWER
- Medical Ultrasound on CAPI: South China University accelerates Delay-and-Sum with POWER and CAPI-attached FPGAs to bring more speed to Cloud-based medical imaging
- OpenRBC Simulation: Brown University gets closer to cracking the code on Red Blook Cell disorders using computational models on OpenPOWER.
- TensorFlow Cancer Detection: Altoros Labs brings a turbo boost to automated cancer detection with OpenPOWER.
- ArtNet Genre Classifier: Praveen Sridhar and Pranav Sridhar turn OpenPOWER into an art connoisseur.
- Scaling Up and Out a Bioinformatics Algorithm: Delft University of Technology advances precision medicine by scaling up and out on OpenPOWER.
All six of these projects will be awarded either a Grand, 2nd or 3rd Prize – stay tuned for the Grand Prize and rankings announcement during the upcoming OpenPOWER Foundation Summit in Barcelona. Finally, plan to join the Grand Prize winners with IBM and OpenPOWER at SC16 in Salt Lake City.
In 2016 Developers became the stars of the OpenPOWER Foundation, and this is just the beginning! Want to learn more about developing on Power? Visit the new Linux on Power Developer Portal.