IBM And NVIDIA Launch OpenPOWER Research Centre In France

Montpellier, France, is now the home of a new IBM OpenPOWER research centre that will focus efforts on developing Big Data and high performance computing (HPC) technology for the OpenPOWER Foundation.

IBM, along with partners NVIDIA and Mellanox, hope that the centre will drive OpenPOWER adoption, with the project providing commercial and open-source software developers with tech assistance for HPC applications.

Vice president of IBM’s HPC ‘market engagement’ division, Dave Turek, said that the centre proves IBM’s commitment to open-source collaboration, and is the next step in expanding the OpenPOWER ecosystem.

“Teaming with NVIDIA and Mellanox, the centre 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,” said Turek.

The OpenPOWER foundation was started in 2013 and promotes research into redefining the technology used in data centres. Other members include Google, Samsung, Hitachi and Ubuntu. Founded by IBM, the consortium opened up the firm’s Power Architecture technology such as processors and firmware to an open source model, allowing other members to use and help research advances.

The Challenge

“Increasing computational performance while minimising energy consumption is a challenge the industry must overcome in the race to exascale computing,” said Stefan Kraemer, director of HPC Business Development, EMEA, at NVIDIA.

“By providing systems combining IBM Power CPUs with GPU accelerators and the NVIDIA NVLink high-speed GPU interconnect technology, we can help the new centre address both objectives, enabling scientists to achieve new breakthroughs in their research.”

The centre will house experts from all three firms, and will help drive research and adoption into IBM’s POWER architecture, NVIDIA’s Tesla Accelerated Computing Platform, and Mellanox’s Infiniband networking products.

“The new POWER Acceleration and Design Center will help scientists and engineers address the grand challenges facing society in the fields of energy and environment, information and health care using the most advanced HPC architectures and technologies,” said Mellanox Technologies.

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