OpenPOWER and Open Compute Open the Data Center

By Bryan Talik, President, OpenPOWER Foundation

The old adage “birds of a feather flock together” often proves true, and the members of the OpenPOWER Foundation are a testament to that wisdom. In fact, members of the OpenPOWER Foundation are coming together at the 2017 U.S. Open Compute Summit in Santa Clara, CA on March 8 to celebrate openness.

Living and Breathing Open Values

To say that OpenPOWER and its members embrace open collaboration would be an understatement, and at Open Compute Summit our members are living by that value.

Andy Walsh, Xilinx Director of Strategic Market Development and OpenPOWER Foundation Board member explains, “We very much support open standards and the broad innovation they foster. Open Compute and OpenPOWER are catalysts in enabling new data center capabilities in computing, storage, and networking.”  

“Open standards and communities lead to rapid innovation,” says Adam Smith, CEO of Alpha Data.  “We are proud to support the latest advances of OpenPOWER accelerator technology featuring Xilinx FPGAs. Alpha Data’s production-ready FPGA accelerator boards provide leading edge development platforms for the highest performance solutions, significantly reducing the development time required to accelerate applications using FPGAs.”

Some members even see collaboration as they key to satisfying the performance demands that the computing market craves.

“The computing industry is at an inflection point between conventional processing and specialized processing,” said Aaron Sullivan, distinguished engineer at Rackspace. “To satisfy this shift in our industry, Rackspace and Google announced an OCP-OpenPOWER server platform last year, codenamed Zaius and Barreleye G2. At the OCP Summit, both companies are putting on the first public display of Zaius and Barreleye G2, marking a radical step forward for OCP and our industry. This server platform will advance the performance, bandwidth and power consumption demands for emerging applications that leverage machine learning, cognitive systems, real-time analytics and big data platforms. We look forward to our continued work alongside Google, OpenPOWER, OpenCAPI, and other Zaius project members, sharing the benefits with contributors and consumers across the world.”

Get Hands on with OpenPOWER at Booth C10

To showcase all of the great Open Compute Project collaborations our members are designing, developing, and producing we’ll have our own booth for the second year in a row! Come join us at booth C10 at the Santa Clara Convention center to see the latest demonstrations:

• Prototypes of the product codenamed Zaius, the Open Compute POWER9server platform designed by Google and Rackspace in collaboration with ODM partner Ingrasys Technology Inc., will be in the booth to see first-hand. In addition, Google and Rackspace published  the Zaius specification to Open Compute  in October 2016. Talk with engineers to learn about the specification process or to create a starting point for your own server design.
• Inventec will show a POWER9 OpenPOWER server based on the Zaius server specification. 
• Mellanox will showcase ConnectX-5, their next generation networking adaptor that features 100Gb/s Infiniband and Ethernet. This adaptor supports PCIe Gen4 and CAPI2.0, providing a higher performance and coherent connection to the POWER9 processor vs. PCIe Gen3.
• Wistron and E4 Computing will showcase their newly announced OCP-form factor POWER8 server. Featuring two POWER8 processors, four NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPUs with the NVLink interconnect, and liquid cooling, the new platform represents an ideal OCP-compliant HPC system.
• In collaboration with many partners – IBM, Xilinx, and Alpha Data will have a line-up of several FPGA adaptors designed for POWER8 and POWER9.  Featuring PCIe Gen3 CAPI1.0 for POWER8, PCIe Gen4 CAPI2.0 and 25G/s CAPI3.0 for POWER9, these new FPGAs bring acceleration to a whole new level.  OpenPOWER member engineers will be on-hand to provide information regarding the CAPI SNAP developer and programming framework as well as OpenCAPI.
• IBM will showcase their work performed at Facebook’s Disaggregate Lab — where they tested Leopard and Knox with IBM’s Spectrum Scale software. This demonstrates the flexibility of using high performance open hardware with software-defined storage.
• Additionally, IBM has previously tested POWER8-based OCP and OpenPOWER Barreleye servers with IBM’s Spectrum Scale software, a full-featured global parallel file system with roots in High Performance Computing and now widely adopted in commercial enterprises across all industries for data management at petabyte scale. This work will also be shown at our booth.

It is very exciting to see how the ecosystem is coming together to revolutionize the datacenter, and Open Compute Summit is a great opportunity to network and build collaborative relationships with other open-minded organizations.

Hope to see you at the Summit and booth C10!