OpenPower Foundation members show off innovations at first OpenPower Summit

Inaugural OpenPower Summit kicks off in San Jose

Members of the OpenPower Foundation have used the OpenPower Summit to showcase new and upcoming Power-based technologies, including the first commercially available OpenPower server from Tyan, an open server design using Open Compute concepts, and a prototype exascale system from IBM and Wistron.

Opening today at the San Jose convention centre, the event is the first OpenPower Summit, bringing together members of the community that IBM founded in 2013 to develop next-generation data centre infrastructure based on IBM's Power architecture and open standards.

"Since our first public event just under one year ago, the Foundation has expanded dramatically and enabled the development of a new breed of data centre technology products worldwide," said Gordon MacKean chair of the OpenPower Foundation.

The Foundation now counts over 100 organisations among its membership, including Google, Samsung, Nvidia, Rackspace and others, with high-performance storage vendor DataDirect Networks joining this week.

Founder member Tyan Computer Corporation is showing at the event its Tyan TN71-BP012, which it claims will be the first commercially available OpenPower server when it ships sometime in the second quarter of 2015. The move follows its reference OpenPower server launched last year.

The 2U rack-mount system is designed for large-scale cloud deployments, according to Tyan, and IBM will be among the first to deploy the new hardware to operate its upcoming OpenPower-based bare metal server platform on its SoftLayer cloud service.

Meanwhile, IBM is showcasing at the event a prototype of a new high-performance server platform it and Wistron are jointly developing using technology from Nvidia and Mellanox.

The system is expected to be the first in a series of solutions to be introduced as part of IBM's OpenPower technical computing roadmap, leading up to the firm's future delivery to the US government of two new computing systems leading towards exascale computing, codenamed "Summit" and "Sierra".

Hosting firm Rackspace also showed off a server design and a prototype motherboard based on OpenPower technology and Open Compute Project design concepts. The design is intended for deployment in Rackspace data centres to operate OpenStack services.

New Foundation member Cirrascale has a Power8-based development platform that supports up to four Nvidia Tesla K40 GPU accelerator cards. The Cirrascale RM4950 features a PCIe fabric for high speed peer-to-peer access between the GPU cards, and is targeting machine learning, big data analytics and scientific computing applications.

The OpenPower Foundation was started by an IBM in a bid to develop a partner ecosystem around the Power architecture, and promote it as the platform of choice for enterprises building scale-out data centre infrastructure.

IBM has gained support from a variety of vendors, with Suse and Red Hat porting their enterprise Linux platforms to Power8, for example. This week, Suse and big data specialist Veristorm also announced support for Veristorm's Data Hub and vStorm Enterprise Hadoop solutions on Suse Linux Enterprise Server 12 on Power8.