Open POWER-Open Compute-POWER9 at Open Compute Summit

Bryan Talik, President, OpenPOWER Foundation provides a detailed rundown on the action at the Open Compute  Summit held last week in Santa Clara. After weeks of writing about Cognitive, Machine Learning, Blockchain, and even quantum computing, it is a nice shift to conventional computing platforms that should still be viewed as strategic initiatives.

The OpenPOWER, Open Compute gospel was filling the air in Santa Clara.  As reported, Andy Walsh, Xilinx Director of Strategic Market Development and OpenPOWER Foundation Board member explained, “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.”

Added Adam Smith, CEO of Alpha Data:  “Open standards and communities lead to rapid innovation…We are proud to support the latest advances of OpenPOWER accelerator technology featuring Xilinx FPGAs.”

John Zannos, Canonical OpenPOWER Board Chair chimed in: For 2017, the OpenPOWER Board approved four areas of focus that include machine learning/AI, database and analytics, cloud applications and containers. The strategy for 2017 also includes plans to extend OpenPOWER’s reach worldwide and promote technical innovations at various academic labs and in industry. Finally, the group plans to open additional application-oriented workgroups to further technical solutions that benefits specific application areas.

Not surprisingly, some members even see collaboration as the 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,” according to Aaron Sullivan, distinguished engineer at Rackspace. “

To satisfy this shift, Rackspace and Google announced an OCP-OpenPOWER server platform last year, codenamed Zaius and Barreleye G2.  It is based on POWER9. At the OCP Summit, both companies put on a public display of the two products.

This server platform promises to improve the performance, bandwidth, and power consumption demands for emerging applications that leverage machine learning, cognitive systems, real-time analytics and big data platforms. The OCP players plan to continue their work alongside Google, OpenPOWER, OpenCAPI, and other Zaius project members.

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.”

This Zaius and Barreleye G@ server platforms promise to advance the performance, bandwidth and power consumption demands for emerging applications that leverage the latest advanced technologies. These latest technologies are none other than the strategic imperatives–cognitive, machine learning, real-time analytics–IBM has been repeating like a mantra for months.

Open Compute Projects also were displayed at the Summit. Specifically, as reported: Google and Rackspace, published the Zaius specification to Open Compute in October 2016, and had engineers to explain the specification process and to give attendees a starting point for their own server design.

Other Open Compute members, reportedly, also were there. Inventec showed a POWER9 OpenPOWER server based on the Zaius server specification. Mellanox showcased ConnectX-5, its next generation networking adaptor that features 100Gb/s Infiniband and Ethernet. This adaptor supports PCIe Gen4 and CAPI2.0, providing a higher performance and a coherent connection to the POWER9 processor vs. PCIe Gen3.

Others, reported by Talik, included Wistron and E4 Computing, which showcased 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.

Talik also reported IBM, Xilinx, and Alpha Data showed their line ups of several FPGA adaptors designed for both POWER8 and POWER9. Featuring PCIe Gen3, CAPI1.0 for POWER8 and PCIe Gen4, CAPI2.0 and 25G/s CAPI3.0 for POWER9 these new FPGAs bring acceleration to a whole new level. OpenPOWER member engineers were on-hand to provide information regarding the CAPI SNAP developer and programming framework as well as OpenCAPI.

Not to be left out, Talik reported that IBM showcased products it previously tested and demonstrated: POWER8-based OCP and OpenPOWER Barreleye servers running IBM’s Spectrum Scale software, a full-featured global parallel file system with roots in HPC and now widely adopted in commercial enterprises across all industries for data management at petabyte scale.  Guess compute platform isn’t quite the dirty phrase IBM has been implying for months.

DancingDinosaur is Alan Radding, a veteran information technology analyst, writer, and ghost-writer. Please follow DancingDinosaur on Twitter, @mainframeblog. See more of his IT writing at technologywriter.com and here.

 

Latest IBM Initiatives Drive Power Advantages over x86

This past week IBM announced a multi-year strategic collaboration between it and Xilinx that aims to enable higher performance and energy-efficient data center applications through Xilinx FPGA-enabled workload acceleration on IBM POWER-based systems. The goal is to deliver open acceleration infrastructures, software, and middleware to address applications like machine learning, network functions virtualization (NFV), genomics, high performance computing (HPC), and big data analytics. In the process, IBM hopes to put x86 systems at an even greater price/performance disadvantage.

Courtesy of IBM

At the same time IBM and several fellow OpenPOWER Foundation members revealed new technologies, collaborations and developer resources to enable clients to analyze data more deeply and at high speed. The new offerings center on the tight integration of IBM’s open and licensable POWER processors with accelerators and dedicated high performance x86e processors optimized for computationally intensive software code. The accelerated POWER-based offerings come at a time when many companies are seeking the best platform for Internet of Things, machine learning, and other performance hungry applications.

The combination of collaborations and alliances are clearly aimed at establishing Power as the high performance leader for the new generation of workloads. Noted IBM, independent software vendors already are leveraging IBM Flash Storage attached to CAPI to create very large memory spaces for in-memory processing of analytics, enabling the same query workloads to run with a fraction of the number of servers compared to commodity x86 solutions.  These breakthroughs enable POWER8-based systems to continue where the promise of Moore’s Law falls short, by delivering performance gains through OpenPOWER ecosystem-driven, full stack innovation. DancingDinosaur covered efforts to expand Moore’s Law on the z a few weeks back here.

The new workloads present different performance challenges. To begin, we’re talking about heterogeneous workloads that are becoming increasingly prevalent, forcing data centers to turn to application accelerators just to keep up with the demands for throughput and latency at low power. The Xilinx All Programmable FPGAs promise to deliver the power efficiency that makes accelerators practical to deploy throughout the data center. Just combine IBM’s open and licensable POWER architecture with Xilinx FPGAs to deliver compelling performance, performance/watt, and lower total cost of ownership for this new generation of data centers workloads.

As part of the IBM and Xilinx strategic collaboration, IBM Systems Group developers will create solution stacks for POWER-based servers, storage, and middleware systems with Xilinx FPGA accelerators for data center architectures such as OpenStack, Docker, and Spark. IBM will also develop and qualify Xilinx accelerator boards for IBM Power Systems servers. Xilinx is developing and will release POWER-based versions of its leading software defined SDAccel™ Development Environment and libraries for the OpenPOWER developer community.

But there is more than this one deal. IBM is promising new products, collaborations and further investments in accelerator-based solutions on top of the POWER processor architecture.  Most recently announced were:

The coupling of NVIDIA® Tesla® K80 GPUs, the flagship offering of the NVIDIA Tesla Accelerated Computing Platform, with Watson’s POWER-based architecture to accelerate Watson’s Retrieve and Rank API capabilities to 1.7x of its normal speed. This speed-up can further improve the cost-performance of Watson’s cloud-based services.

On the networking front Mellanox announced the world’s first smart network switch, the Switch-IB 2, capable of delivering an estimated 10x system performance improvement. NEC also announced availability of its ExpEther Technology suited for POWER architecture-based systems, along with plans to leverage IBM’s CAPI technology to deliver additional accelerated computing value in 2016.

Finally, two OpenPOWER members, E4 Computer Engineering and Penguin Computing, revealed new systems based on the OpenPOWER design concept and incorporating IBM POWER8 and NVIDIA Tesla GPU accelerators. IBM also reported having ported a series of key IBM Internet of Things, Spark, Big Data, and Cognitive applications to take advantage of the POWER architecture with accelerators.

The announcements include the names of partners and products but product details were in short supply as were cost and specific performance details. DancingDinosaur will continue to chase those down.

DancingDinosaur is Alan Radding, a veteran information technology analyst and writer. Please follow DancingDinosaur on Twitter, @mainframeblog. See more of his IT writing at technologywriter.com and here.

DancingDinosaur will not post the week of Thanksgiving. Have a delicious holiday.

IBM Power Systems LC Aims to Expand the Power Systems Market

IBM is rapidly trying to capitalize on its investment in POWER technology and the OpenPOWER Foundation to expand the POWER franchise. The company is offering up the  Power Systems LC Server family; LC for Linux Community. This addresses how processing will be used in the immediate future; specifically in Hybrid Cloud, Hyperscale Data Centers, and Open Solutions. You could probably throw in IoT and big data/real-time analytics too although those weren’t specifically mentioned in any of the LC announcement materials or briefings.

Courtesy of IBM:  the new Power S822LC (click to enlarge)

The LC Server family  comes with a new IBM go-to-market strategy, as IBM put it: buy servers the way you want to buy them; online with simple pricing and a one-click purchase (coming soon). Your choice of standard configurations or have your configuration customized to meet your unique needs through IBM’s global ecosystem of partners and providers. Same with a selection of service and support options from an array of IBM technology partners.

There appear to be three basic configurations at this point:

1. Power Systems S812LC: designed for entry and small Hadoop workloads
2. Power Systems S822LC for Commercial Computing: ideal for data in the cloud and flexible capacity for MSPs
3. Power Systems S822LC for High Performance Computing: for cluster deployments across a broad range of industries

According to the latest S812LC spec sheet, the IBM 8348 Power System S812LC server with POWER8 processors is optimized for data and Linux. It is designed to deliver superior performance and throughput for high-value Linux workloads such as industry applications, open source, big data, and LAMP.  It incorporates OpenPOWER Foundation innovations for organizations that want the advantages of running their big data, Java, open source, and industry applications on a platform designed and optimized for data and Linux. Modular in design, the Power S812LC is simple to order and can scale from single racks to hundreds.

The Power S812LC server supports one processor socket, offering 8-core 3. 32 GHz or 10-core 2.92 GHz POWER8 configurations in a 19-inch rack-mount, 2U drawer configuration. All the cores are activated. The server provides 32 DIMM memory slots. Memory features supported are 4 GB (#EM5A), 8 GB (#EM5E), 16 GB (#EM5C), and 32 GB (#EM5D), allowing for a maximum system memory of 1024 GB.

The LC Server family will leverage a variety of innovations that have been brought out by various members of the OpenPOWER Foundation over the last few months.  These include innovations from Wistron, redislabs, Tyan, Nvidia, Mellanox, Ubuntu, and Nallatech in the areas of big data, GPU acceleration, HPC, and cloud. And, of course, IBM’s CAPI.

No actual pricing was provided. In response to a question from DancingDinosaur about whether the arrival of products from the OpenPOWER Foundation was driving down Power Systems prices, the response was a curt: “We haven’t seen the drag down,” said an IBM manager. Oh well, so much for an imminent price war over Power Systems.

However, IBM reported today that  based on its own internal testing, a new Power Systems LC server can complete an average of select Apache Spark workloads – including analyzing Twitter feeds, streaming web page views and other data-intensive analytics – for less than half the cost of an Intel E5-2699 V3 processor-based server, providing clients with 2.3x better performance per dollar spent. Additionally, the efficient design of a Power Systems LC server allows for 94% more Spark social media workloads in the same rack space as a comparable Intel-based server.

These new systems are exactly what is needed to make the POWER platform viable over the long term, and it can’t be just an IBM show. With OpenPOWER Foundation members delivering innovations there is no telling what can be done in terms of computing with POWER9 and POWER10 when they come.

DancingDinosaur is Alan Radding, a veteran IT analyst and writer. Please follow DancingDinosaur on Twitter, @mainframeblog. See more of his IT writing at technologywriter.com and here.

Open POWER Consortium Aims to Expand the POWER Ecosystem beyond IBM

With IBM’s August 6 announcement of new POWER partners, including Google, not only is IBM aiming to expand the variety of POWER workloads but establish an alternative ecosystem to Intel/ x86 that continues to dominate general corporate computing.  Through the new Open POWER Consortium, IBM will make  POWER hardware and software available for open development for the first time as well as offer open-source POWER firmware, the software that controls basic chip functions. By doing this, IBM and the consortium can enable innovative customization in creating new styles of server hardware for a variety of computing workloads.

IBM has a long history of using open consortiums to grab a foothold in different markets;  as it did with Eclipse (open software development tools), Linux (open portable operating system), KVM (open hypervisor and virtualization), and OpenStack (open cloud interoperability). In each case, IBM had proprietary technologies but could use the open source consortium strategy to expand market opportunities at the expense of entrenched proprietary competitors like Microsoft or VMware.  The Open POWER Consortium opens a new front against Intel, which already is scrambling to fend off ARM-based systems and other lightweight processors.

The establishment of the Open POWER Consortium also reinforces IBM’s commitment to the POWER platform in the face of several poor quarters. The commitment to POWER has never really wavered, insists an IBM manager, despite what financial analysts might hint at. Even stronger evidence of that commitment to POWER is POWER8, which is on track for 2014 if not sooner, and POWER9, which is currently in development, he confirmed.

As part of its initial collaboration within the consortium, IBM reported it and NVIDIA will integrate NVIDIA’s CUDA GPU and POWER.  CUDA is a parallel computing platform and programming model that enables dramatic increases in computing performance by harnessing the power of the graphics processing unit (GPU).  GPUs increasingly are being used to boost overall system performance, not just graphics performance. The two companies envision powerful computing systems based on NVIDIA GPUs and IBM’s POWER CPUs  and represent an example of the new kind of systems the open consortium can produce.

However, don’t expect immediate results.  The IBM manager told DancingDinosaur that the fruits of any collaboration won’t start showing up until sometime next year. Even the Open POWER Collaboration website has yet to post anything. The consortium is just forming up; IBM expects the public commitment of Google to attract other players, which IBM describes as the next generation of data-center innovators.

As for POWER users, this can only be a good thing. IBM is not reducing its commitment to the POWER roadmap, plus users will be able to enjoy whatever the new players bring to the POWER party, which could be considerable. In the meantime, the Open POWER Consortium welcomes any firm that wants to innovate on the POWER platform and participate in an open, collaborative effort.

An even more interesting question may be where else will IBM’s interest in open systems and open consortiums take it. IBM remains “very focused on open and it’s a safe bet that IBM will continue to support open technologies and groups that support that,” the IBM manager told DancingDinosaur.  IBM, however, has nothing to announce after the Open POWER Consortium. Hmm, might a z/OS open collaborative consortium someday be in the works?

SHARE will be in Boston next week. DancingDinosaur expects to be there and will report on the goings-on. Hope to see some of you there.  There also are plans for a big IBM System z/Power conference, Enterprise Systems 2013, toward to end of October in Florida.  Haven’t seen many details yet, but will keep you posted as they come in.