New Physical Science Work Group Addresses Physics, Chemistry, and more with OpenPOWER

By Andrea Bulgarelli, Chair, OpenPOWER Physical Science Work Group

As the application of OpenPOWER technology expands, so too must the OpenPOWER Foundation continue to explore workloads demanded by the market that best leverage our technology. In pursuit of that, the OpenPOWER Foundation is pleased to announce the formation of the new Physical Science Work Group.

The Physical Science Work Group is a persistent work group focused on establishing an OpenPOWER Foundation interface between their members and the Physical Science community. This Work Group aims at addressing the challenges of Physical Science projects by developing use cases, identifying requirements and extracting workflows.

Applying OpenPOWER to Physical Sciences

We made the decision to create this work group to understand how the OpenPOWER ecosystem can help physical science projects. Today the scientific community (from Big Science projects to a single laboratory) is facing an enormous increase in data volume, rate and dimensionality from experiments, and computational science.

There are two main projects that will be addressed by the work group:

(1) Current and future Physical Science projects use cases, requirements, common workflows and reference solutions. Based on these requirements, identification of common workflows and possible reference solutions in collaboration with other OpenPOWER Foundation Workroups.

(2) Scientific software frameworks and libraries. Identification of widely used software frameworks and libraries used in the Physical Science, the status of the porting to OpenPOWER solutions.

Another important point is to focus hardware/software developer around physical science projects requirements that are not covered by current solutions.

An Open Approach

Working around use cases, the WG allows the OpenPOWER Foundation to be a forum between scientists and technical solutions developers, and also between scientists of different fields and projects to share experience and solutions with each other. The participation to this work group is open also for non-OpenPOWER member, to help to open the discussion within the Physical Science community around the OpenPOWER technology. For the same reason contributions and feedback are not subject to any requirement of confidentiality. The deliverables and their reviews are public. This will help to collect feedback from all interested people, not only OpenPOWER Foundation members.

Learn more at OpenPOWER Summit Europe

This Friday, at the OpenPOWER Foundation Summit Europe, I will explain what the Physical Science Work Group is, why it was important for the Foundation to start it, and what are some of the workloads/problems the work group will work to address. To learn more about the new work group and others that are exploring the potential and use of OpenPOWER technology, please visit https://openpowerfoundation.org/technical/working-groups/.