OpenPOWER Summit North America: Meet Speaker J Lynn

This year’s OpenPOWER Summit North America will be jam-packed with ground breaking announcements and technical presentations given by innovators from around the globe. We asked Scalable Systems Engineer and session speaker J Lynn about their thoughts on the future of technology and what audiences will learn by attending the sessions they will be leading at this year’s event.

Learn more about J below!

Tell us about your day job and what you work on.

My title is Scalable Systems Engineer, and as you’d suspect from the name, my duties involve designing, implementing, and operating information processing systems and environments, at all scales.

Can you describe the sessions you’ll be leading at OpenPOWER Summit North America and a few key takeaways for the audience?

I’ll be leading two sessions at this year’s OpenPOWER Summit: Using an OpenPOWER Workstation for Everything, Every Day: A Guided Tour and Project Xevadyne / X: Building a High Performance, Open Source POWER Compatible Microarchitecture - Going from ISA to Source to FPGA to Foundry and Beyond.

The first session I’ll be leading is a result of my work on the second, which stemmed from my desire to have a provably secure, owner-controlled computer system – the entirety of which could be understood at every level of complexity. I believe that the technologies underlying our everyday lives should be available and understandable by any motivated person. In a very real sense, computers have become extensions of each of our minds. Therefore, naturally, they should be just as trustworthy. That’s why I choose to contribute my time to free and open source software projects.

With this in mind, I chose OpenPOWER systems as my primary computing platform. It is the most performant and best documented computing platform available. The existing software ecosystem is excellent and diverse, and every application I’ve needed has been or is currently being ported to the POWER ISA. Another reason why I chose OpenPOWER is, hands down, the community. The group of passionate, diverse people who work with these systems seem to understand the spirit of IBM’s motto: “Think.” Overall, that’s why I want to speak about what it’s like to use the platform on a daily basis and show others what works, what doesn’t, and how we can all work together to make it better.

What else are you looking forward to at this year’s OpenPOWER Summit? What do you think this year’s “can’t miss” sessions are?

For me, it’s all about the Protected Execution Facility (PEF) and Ultravisor. That one function will drive a paradigm shift in how we use and trust cloud services, which, in turn, will drive a paradigm shift in how we exchange, use, and trust computers and computing services in general.

I’d recommend checking out Protected Execution Facility on POWER and Securing Containers Using Power Protected Execution Facility.

What’s a current technology or topic that is especially exciting to you, and where do you think that technology is headed in the next 5-10 years?

Like I mentioned, I’m incredibly interested in Protected Execution Facility (PEF) and Ultravisor. This new, secure platform on which we can build, as enabled by PEF and the Ultravisor design, will enable us to create a virtual hyperscale cloud provider as reliable as the whole internet across all jurisdictions, which can onboard new technologies at an ever accelerating pace.

Computing will become a commodity traded freely, on a real-time global marketplace, without single source risk. That explicit trust and its associated risks will become redressable and priceable.

In essence: portable, trustworthy, open, and evolving. Finally – and all of it driven by the unprecedented levels of open in OpenPOWER.

Definitely keep an eye on this space. It’s going to be gargantuan, and IBM is at the forefront of it with OpenPOWER and their latest implementation of POWER, the next revision of POWER9.