By Ganesan Narayanasamy (OpenPOWER Academic Discussion Group Leader)

Before SC15 would kick off on November 15th, about 40 of the 170+ members of the OpenPOWER Foundation were already gathered in Austin to discuss OpenPOWER technologies for High Performance Computing (HPC) and High Performance Data Analytics applications. Ready to share and discuss their work in emerging workload optimization for OpenPOWER, members of the OpenPOWER Academic Discussion Group (ADG) took an opportunity to network, share knowledge and explore commercial collaboration opportunities at the ADG’s first annual meeting.  Presentations from the meeting are available for download here.

Participants included representatives *from NVIDIA, Jülich Supercomputing Centre, Delft University of Technology, Texas Advanced Computing Center, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, A*STAR Computational Research Centre, the UK’s STFC Hartree Centre, and IBM (Apache Spark on Power, POWER8, Genomics on Power).

*direct links to presentations

[caption id=“attachment_2262” align=“alignnone” width=“625”] Prof. Dirk Pleiter, Jülich Supercomputing Centre[/caption]

From getting the most out of the POWER processor’s advanced features and GPU acceleration to using new Big Data frameworks like Apache Spark along with FPGA acceleration, workshop participants shared their early work in exploiting OpenPOWER to deploy advanced system architectures capable of breakthrough performance when running the most challenging computing workloads.

[caption id=“attachment_2263” align=“aligncenter” width=“625”] Dr. Jack Wells, Oak Ridge National Laboratory Director of Science, Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility[/caption]

Coming together across international, disciplinary and academic boundaries, OpenPOWER ADG members united around common interests including fundamental computing challenges in HPC (parallelization, latency, bandwidth, job throughput) and use of the latest community and commercially supported software. It was a first step in launching formal collaboration around OpenPOWER across the Academic Community, who are among the first to address the newest, hardest problems in science and scientific computing.

As we begin the New Year I look forward to seeing OpenPOWER ADG members continue to shape and apply OpenPOWER technology to push the boundaries of computing ever further, together.

Learn More

• Download presentations from the 1st Annual OpenPOWER ADG Workshop at SC15 in Austin here.
• Read about the OpenPOWER ADG’s India Summit 2015 held in Bangalore, India.

Join Us!

• If interested in joining the OpenPOWER Academic Discussion Group, please email Ganesan Narayanasamy
• Visit the ADG at the OpenPOWER Summit 2016 (check back here for details coming soon)
• Visit the ADG at ISC 2016 in Frankfurt (check back here for details)
• Join the 2nd annual ADG Workshop at SC 2016 in Salt Lake City (check back here for details)

About Author

Ganesan Narayanasamy is a Senior Manager with IBM Systems Lab and brings 15 years experience in High Performance Computing R&D and technical leadership to his many activities within the OpenPOWER Foundation including leadership of the Foundation’s Academic Discussion Working Group.  He’s passionate about working with universities and research institutes with whom he’s currently working to help develop curriculum, labs, and centers of excellence around OpenPOWER technology.