OpenPOWER Foundation Executive Director Has a History of Tinkering with Technology

Hugh Blemings, Executive Director, OpenPOWER Foundation

[caption id=“attachment_5108” align=“alignright” width=“150”] “It’s fair to say that POWER has been in my blood in one way or another for nearly 20 years.” - Hugh Blemings, Executive Director, OpenPOWER Foundation[/caption]

It’s fair to say that POWER has been in my blood in one way or another for nearly 20 years.

I grew up as pretty much the stereotypical “geek.” When I was eight years old, I took a clock apart, put it back together. I was inspired by and never fully recovered from this first experience tinkering with technology.

My career has taken a number of twists and turns:

• I began working in electronics and software design for a local electronics firm, which exposed me to various processor architectures and gave me a good sense of basic, low-level coding.
• I got into Linux and began playing with Linux on PowerPC hardware.
• While at IBM, I managed the OzLabs team that did the upstream Linux kernel port for POWER4 (this group continues doing amazing work to this day, including support for each new POWER chip).
• At Rackspace, I was fortunate to be peripherally involved in the Barrelleye project – the company’s vision for a more powerful cloud. I was heartened by the excellent benchmark results we saw with real world workloads.

I’m excited that the latest development in my career has led me to join the OpenPOWER Foundation as its Executive Director. When the foundation was developed, I was inspired to see so many key members come together to support POWER technology. These members each play an important role in making this technology as open and widely used as possible – all while retaining the architectural superiority.

Across the OpenPOWER Foundation membership, there is amazing work being done. From software and hardware to interconnect and cloud technologies, I’m constantly inspired by how POWER is being used.

As Executive Director of the foundation, I intend to shine a brighter light on this work by our members. I also plan to make it easier for developers to experience POWER technology, a goal I share with OpenPOWER Foundation’s chairperson Robbie Williamson. By allowing more developers to run their code on POWER – perhaps even remotely – the OpenPOWER Foundation will continue to grow.

I’m looking forward to meeting and speaking with as many OpenPOWER Foundation members as possible in the coming weeks and months. Please find me on LinkedIn or Twitter, and don’t hesitate to say hello!