New HPC Center in France to Push OpenPOWER Adoption

IBM, NVIDIA and Mellanox are opening a center focused on OpenPOWER in Montpellier, France. OpenPOWER is a foundation meant to boost IBM’s open and licensable POWER architecture.

OpenPOWER is positioning itself as an alternative to x86-based products that currently dominate in data centers. The messaging has been around its applicability to high-performance computing workloads. The new center will promote development of HPC applications as the consortium looks to extend the OpenPOWER ecosystem.

IBM and others are trying to promote the use of POWER architecture. These centers get more scientists and engineers working with POWER in general, with the goal of not only developing new applications but also training people to work with the architecture.

The centers are equipped with the latest HPC technologies that will be used to tackle problems in fields like energy and healthcare. Last month, IBM launched SuperVessel, an OpenPOWER developer cloud service meant for universities to develop new uses and apps for free.

IBM, NVIDIA, and Mellanox are contributing experts that will help developers take advantage of GPU acceleration on OpenPOWER-compatible systems.

These are the same types of systems that will be used by the US Department of Energy for the next generation Sierra and Summit supercomputers and by the UK’s Science and Technology Facilities Council for Big Data research. The latter project involved a $475 million commitment by IBM.

The POWER Acceleration and Design Center is the second center in Europe. The new center is a sister institution to the Jülich Supercomputing Center IBM and NVIDIA unveiled in Germany last November.

“Our launch of this new center reinforces IBM’s commitment to open source collaboration and is a next step in expanding the software and solution ecosystem around OpenPOWER,” said Dave Turek, IBM’s vice president of HPC Market Engagement, in a press release. “Teaming with NVIDIA and Mellanox, the center will allow us to leverage the strengths of each of our companies to extend innovation and bring higher value to our customers around the world.”