IBM launched its SuperVessel to act as a virtual Research and Design engine for applications.
OpenPOWER, the open hardware initiative created by IBM has opened up the company’s Power architecture to its co-founding partners NVIDIA, Mellanox, Google and Tyan.
Hardware makers will be able to create processors which are tightly integrated to Power CPU cores that can be used in High Performance Computing applications. While hyperscale users such as Google can leverage the OpenPOWER hardware for their datacentres.
The open sourcing of its hardware will likely boost adoption and help it to compete with other hardware providers.
The open access cloud service will be available to developers who want to participate in the OpenPOWER ecosystem and will provide creation, testing and pilot for emerging applications. Users will have access to analytics, machine learning and IoT.
The building blocks of SuperVessel include a cloud which is based on POWER processors, with FPGA’s and GPUs to provide acceleration of service, OpenStack manages the whole cloud.
It is divided into online "labs" which users can access open source software through to build and test applications, as well as share experiences and best practices.
Hemant Dhulla, VP, Data Centre & Wired Communications, Xilinx, said: "FPGA-based compute acceleration is a critical part of the OpenPOWER Foundation vision to handle demanding workloads in the most cost and power-efficient way."
"For this reason, a CAPI-enabled Xilinx FPGA is attached to every IBM POWER8 node in the SuperVessel cloud. The research and development being done in SuperVessel is helping to define the future of heterogeneous computing."
