N1005 IBM Research: openpower

Accelerating Watson’s Performance with OpenPOWER

<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://asmarterplanet.com/files/2014/02/rob_high.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://asmarterplanet.com/files/2014/02/rob_high.jpg" /></a></div><i><span style="font-family: "helvneue light for ibm" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.0pt;">Editor's note: This article is by Rob High, IBM Fellow and IBM Watson CTO.</span></i> <br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "helvneue light for ibm" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">It’s only been four years since Watson played and won <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Jeopardy!</i>against the very best players with a machine roughly the size of a master bedroom. Since then, we’ve completely re-engineered Watson’s appearance and abilities, delivering it via the cloud and incorporating revolutionary features that span language, speech, vision and data insights. <br /><br />With more than 30 cognitive services available via the </span><span style="font-family: "helvneue light for ibm" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.0pt;"><a href="http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercloud/"><span style="color: #0082bf; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Watson Developer Cloud</span></a></span><span style="font-family: "helvneue light for ibm" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">on </span><span style="font-family: "helvneue light for ibm" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.0pt;"><a href="http://www.ibm.com/cloud-computing/bluemix/"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Bluemix</span></a></span><span style="font-family: "helvneue light for ibm" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, we're bridging the gap between technology and today’s leading industries, accelerating how doctors, lawyers, marketers and other professionals analyze high volumes of data and glean critical insights to improve decision-making and to generate new ideas.</span><br /><a name="more"></a><span style="font-family: "helvneue light for ibm" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br />Watson’s ability to recognize patterns of text, speech and vision that convey meaning, to understand complex questions through natural language processing, and to continually learn, unlocks the potential of unstructured data across a multitude of industries and disciplines. Watson’s speed and efficiency have always hinged on the quality of its large scale machine learning algorithms. <br /><br />Today, at IBM and OpenPOWER’s Accelerating Innovation event in Austin, we previewed the next iteration of our cognitive computing system architecture, integrating the NVIDIA Tesla Accelerated Computing Platform into Watson’s core technologies. The incorporation of NVIDIA flagship Tesla K80 GPU accelerators – coupled with the Watson’s POWER-based architecture – accelerates Watson’s retrieve and rank capabilities to 1.7x of its normal speed. This fuels our drive to further improve our cost-performance of Watson's cloud-based services. <br /><br />For example, if a call center agent is responding to an individual’s health and insurance query, the agent will be able to leverage Watson’s natural language processing technology to obtain an answer in real-time even faster and cheaper than before.<br /><br />In addition to bolstering response time, the GPU acceleration also increases Watson’s processing power to 10x its prior performance. Watson often requires a lot of compute power and time to digest, annotate and index large quantities of data to prepare it to perform its cognitive tasks. NVIDIA’s Tesla GPUs will accelerate the time it takes the cognitive computing system to process this information to enable it to interact in natural language.<br /><br />The combination of IBM POWER architecture and NVIDIA’s Tesla Platform will also facilitate the expansion of Watson’s deep learning functionality. Hardware acceleration is integral to Watson’s ability to deeply reason about vision and speech recognition – in a short period of time.<br /><br /><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJhkVr1pTBGmDUzkd9UuyZOWIyOxG2s-YvEPK4IV0gmUAL06OaDKgYepgnXEMpijokYtW4IZQEybJTtFP84lW4PDNgrDOGqDro7-AJ90HObcjMqNIFlCyrizJiHb1fTkouuwkXSzTkiKU/s1600/WatsonGPU.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJhkVr1pTBGmDUzkd9UuyZOWIyOxG2s-YvEPK4IV0gmUAL06OaDKgYepgnXEMpijokYtW4IZQEybJTtFP84lW4PDNgrDOGqDro7-AJ90HObcjMqNIFlCyrizJiHb1fTkouuwkXSzTkiKU/s320/WatsonGPU.jpg" width="239" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Watson on Ope<span style="font-family: "helvneue light for ibm" , sans-serif;">nPOWER at </span>Accelerator Day</td></tr></tbody></table>This collaborative effort is a result of the </span><span style="font-family: "helvneue light for ibm" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.0pt;"><a href="http://openpowerfoundation.org/"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">OpenPOWER Foundation</span></a></span><span style="font-family: "helvneue light for ibm" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, a global open development organization formed by IBM, Google, NVIDIA, Mellanox and Tyan to facilitate innovation on POWER architecture and develop collaborative hardware and software solutions.<br /><br />By accelerating Watson’s response time and training capabilities through open innovation, OpenPOWER is also propelling our Watson Ecosystem – which has grown to more than <span style="font-family: "helvneue light for ibm" , sans-serif;">77</span>,000 developers globally and</span><span style="font-family: "helvneue light for ibm" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="font-family: "helvneue light for ibm" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-family: "helvneue light for ibm" , sans-serif;">350</span>startups and established businesses currently commercializing their products and services embedded with sophisticated cognitive computing APIs.<br /><br />Today’s demo in Austin was simply an appetizer, a preview of one of several Watson capabilities that we’re collectively accelerating. We will continue to optimize Watson services with OpenPOWER’s advanced architecture to give developers and clients a competitive edge in today’s cognitive era.<br /><br />One innovation at a time.<br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" /> </span><span style="font-family: "helvneue light for ibm" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.0pt;"></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "helvneue light for ibm" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"><br /></span></span></div>

Editor's note: This article is by Rob High, IBM Fellow and IBM Watson CTO. It’s only been four years since Watson played and won Jeopar...

Data Centric Systems: A new paradigm for computing

5:00 AM N1000 0

<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGrSfilcCHKp59XyfPzV0mYH7RVaMZY0hFGhqgLB0ZlIULvG1GAoECe-1nbY2mPzvFqvuaYcg91AC_HXZcjGuS806yaJg2CoqWYpZtSrh5JF3bw0Ta6V_swM8TYrLQvee3qrTMoXPp5xI/s1600/tilak.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGrSfilcCHKp59XyfPzV0mYH7RVaMZY0hFGhqgLB0ZlIULvG1GAoECe-1nbY2mPzvFqvuaYcg91AC_HXZcjGuS806yaJg2CoqWYpZtSrh5JF3bw0Ta6V_swM8TYrLQvee3qrTMoXPp5xI/s1600/tilak.jpg" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>Editor’s note: This article is by <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/pub/tilak-agerwala/21/aa5/a63">Tilak Agerwala</a>, Vice President of Data Centric Systems at IBM Research</i></span></span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The use of high performance computers (HPC) to model, simulate and analyze everything from astrophysics to zoology goes back to the dawn of the modern computer era. Since the 1950s, the models studied by HPC systems have increased both in scale and in detail with ever more sophisticated users calling for – and planning on – increased computational power. This increase is expressed in the form of Floating Point Operations per Second or FLOPS. Aggregate installed FLOPS, as measured by the Top500, have increased exponentially since tracking began in 1993, going from less than 60 gigaflops to nearly 300 petaflops, today. And the demand for increased FLOPS is not likely to abate for the foreseeable future. </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">However, we are now seeing a new trend emerge that will dramatically change how HPC system design moves forward <span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Mincho"; mso-fareast-language: JA;">–</span> the emergence of <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/ibm/2014/06/30/why-big-data-is-the-new-natural-resource/" target="_blank">data as the world’s newest, and arguably largest, natural resource</a>.</span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Today’s businesses, academic institutions and government agencies continue to have a multitude of applications for HPC, from fraud detection in transaction-based systems like credit cards serving millions of users simultaneously, to computational simulations the human heart beating in real time cell by cell. But unlike 60 years ago, these models now support a trillion fold more data <span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Mincho"; mso-fareast-language: JA;">–</span> leaping from kilobytes to petabytes, and growing. This onslaught of this structured and unstructured data on HPC requires a flexible computing architecture capable of addressing the growing needs for the workloads this data scale demands. In order to prepare for the future, IBM has adopted Data Centric Systems (DCS) design as our new paradigm for computing.</span></span><br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaowisfBHfhFZODxpjE0HH7kbrB_pmyaPOkvZYtArp3oDhymDof4dEIgo-2dAZFhrdjboZ3hAEMz8dDiTP7QNq_sLHBJKzJwGDpakdPy6b4apCP17qLakZciZBeDlGXET-oJq2lEopYhU/s1600/DataCentricSystems6.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaowisfBHfhFZODxpjE0HH7kbrB_pmyaPOkvZYtArp3oDhymDof4dEIgo-2dAZFhrdjboZ3hAEMz8dDiTP7QNq_sLHBJKzJwGDpakdPy6b4apCP17qLakZciZBeDlGXET-oJq2lEopYhU/s1600/DataCentricSystems6.jpg" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The rationale is simple. As the size of data grows, the cost of moving data around becomes prohibitive. We must employ distributed intelligence to bring computation to the data. </span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>How </b><b><b>Data Centric Systems </b> is like a supply chain </b></span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">To illustrate this, consider the evolution of today’s sophisticated supply chains. Today, detailed engineering, design and development work is taken on by highly capable members of the supply chain. Production complexity is distributed by processing components outside of the final manufacturing plant. These are finally brought together just in time for final assembly. This distributed application of specialized skills reduces waste in transport, and also results in a higher level of quality, efficiency, and innovation throughout the manufacturing work flow.  </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Like today’s modern supply chains, our next-generation systems will minimize data in motion. As data volumes grow exponentially the cost (power and time) of moving the data in and out of a central processor is becoming prohibitive. So why not move data less by running workloads where the data lives? Doing this will require “computing” at all levels of the system’s hierarchy by introducing active system elements such as network, memory and elastic storage. The architecture will also need to be composable, based on modular and upgradeable hardware design, and scalable from sub-rack to hundreds of racks.  Finally, it must be on an open platform, like our <a href="http://openpowerfoundation.org/" target="_blank">OpenPOWER</a> which allows deep innovation by partners at all levels of the ecosystem.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>Data Centric Systems will be future “Systems of Insight”</b></span></span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">In 2012, <a href="http://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/view_group.php?id=2992" target="_blank">Project Cardioid</a>, a partnership with Lawrence Livermore National Lab, used Sequoia, the largest Blue Gene/Q system we've ever delivered, with over 700,000 cores and sustained performance of 12 petaflops, to simulate an entire human heart at nearly the cellular level. This groundbreaking simulation modeled 370 million pieces of the human heart, 1,200 times faster than previous, less-accurate simulations. Going from months to near-real time simulation of thousands of beats is helping scientists understand disease, design and test drugs, as well as simulate other human organs.</span></span><br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAa6IPw7oWiucHQaHKuqrKek8KhPqijRPafdSnrfrzvkza3CwGHP9RgiHfybiVpYZnTT589Pnq3WQaO-Jsj2yuFVXsD2z-LPSGDQqusoAQ1rSkbKT7kfWj7W0lBlt06m_D33kj7NXiHEw/s1600/seq_cupps_bertsch_high-res.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="334" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAa6IPw7oWiucHQaHKuqrKek8KhPqijRPafdSnrfrzvkza3CwGHP9RgiHfybiVpYZnTT589Pnq3WQaO-Jsj2yuFVXsD2z-LPSGDQqusoAQ1rSkbKT7kfWj7W0lBlt06m_D33kj7NXiHEw/s1600/seq_cupps_bertsch_high-res.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">BlueGene/Q Sequoia at the LLNL</span></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Let’s fast-forward a few years from now to exascale computing and full DCS systems, and how they can be applied for everything from weather forecasting to finding oil and gas reserves. New sources are increasingly difficult to find and access as companies explore increasingly remote and challenging geologies, like the Arctic and the deep ocean. New sensor technologies provide a lens into these deeply buried hydrocarbon reserves, generating vast amounts of data. </span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">While the data enables us to build much higher-resolution models, like with the heart simulation, the opportunity in this industry is in creating multiple simultaneous, and coupled simulations, to ultimately characterize the reservoir at the molecular level. With this level of insight oil and gas recoveries will be optimized over time. But getting to this level of fidelity will require 100x the compute power of today's fastest, largest systems. We can begin to tackle this type of problem with current systems but to get reach the goal will ultimately require Data Centric Systems.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">True Data Centric Systems will be realized when we can consolidate modeling, simulation, analytics, Big Data, and machine learning and cognitive computing as “Systems of Insight.” They will provide these capabilities faster with more flexibility and lower energy costs, effectively ushering in a new category of computers.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span><b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>For more details <a href="http://icpp.cs.umn.edu/agerwala.pdf" target="_blank">download</a> my keynote presentation at the 2014 International Conference on Parallel Processing.</i></span></span></b>

bluegene Data Centric System Exascale HPC openpower Data Centric Systems: A new paradigm for computing

Editor’s note: This article is by Tilak Agerwala , Vice President of Data Centric Systems at IBM Research The use of high performance comput...

Making Power Open to the Enterprising Masses

1:36 PM N1000 0

<br /><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13.0pt;">Since its development in the 1990s, IBM Power Systems served databases. They crunched big data for big business better than anyone else in the industry. But so these systems would support the boom of mobile and cloud computing – not to mention social media and its unstructured data ilk – IBM decided to open Power 8 technology up to the world via the </span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Mincho"; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><a href="http://openpowerfoundation.org/"><u><span style="color: blue;">OpenPOWER Foundation</span></u></a></span><span class="MsoHyperlink"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13.0pt;">.</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13.0pt;"></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13.0pt;">So, what exactly are founding members such as Google and NVIDIA getting access to? </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHbwe9zyZ5ks0rqY0J4qjw5m5cQiDVfse2IiTFu_DGwmzjGQvXT7TdO6IhVtTpONJveZWCmDsvwcftEtJuM5niLHBIDyXwhs7ea8xxq10C-ScivbL_n9xjyVt8C3yEqFAh8qIDsXP92n4y/s1600/fadi_impact.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHbwe9zyZ5ks0rqY0J4qjw5m5cQiDVfse2IiTFu_DGwmzjGQvXT7TdO6IhVtTpONJveZWCmDsvwcftEtJuM5niLHBIDyXwhs7ea8xxq10C-ScivbL_n9xjyVt8C3yEqFAh8qIDsXP92n4y/s1600/fadi_impact.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Fadi Gebara (middle) at IBM IMPACT Conference 2014</td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13.0pt;">“The easy answer is speed. Power 8 is loaded with up to 12 cores running up to 4.15GHz – which required a 4x increase in memory bandwidth over Power 7 to keep all that muscle fed with different things to do,” said Fadi Gebara, senior manager and Master Inventor at IBM Research-Austin.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13.0pt;">Power 8 processor utilization is also improved by a lower cache and memory latency (wait time). A processor can’t run 100 percent of the time because it has to “check” its memory for needed data. But 128 MB L4 cache on DRAM and up to 230 GB/s per socket of sustained memory bandwidth (supported by 400 GB/s at the DRAM chips) means no stalling. By comparison, Intel’s XEON processor only manages 37.5 MB of cache and 85 GB/s of memory bandwidth – on 15 cores. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13.0pt;">Perhaps Power 8’s greatest advancement is in its Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface (CAPI) interface. It allows others to build new systems on top of Power 8. For example, CAPI can be made to quickly access and analyze unstructured NoSQL data stored in Flash memory. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13.0pt;">All that unstructured social media data stored in the cloud and being transferred across mobile devices? CAPI treats that Flash, NoSQL-stored information like traditional, or “slow,” memory. That translates to Power 8’s 192 threads and 24-to-1 memory density advantage over x86 doing more work, faster and at a lower cost for many cloud-based NoSQLs. But perhaps more importantly than the raw speed at a lower cost, is what can be done with that information.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">  </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13.0pt;">“In the past, we’ve rolled out a new Power system every one to three years. Power 8 lets anyone develop a new system, and innovative applications, at their speed. This is the advantage of Power 8 and OpenPOWER,” said Peter Hofstee, Hybrid and Workload-Optimized Systems engineer and Master Inventor at IBM Research-Austin.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13.0pt;">Power 8 open to ideas</span></b><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13.0pt;"></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13.0pt;">Founding OpenPower member and search giant Google showed off its Power 8 motherboard at the recent IMPACT Conference. Their Senior Director, and OpenPOWER Foundation Director, Gordon McKean </span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Mincho"; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><a href="http://www.cnet.com/news/google-acquires-a-taste-for-ibms-power8-processors/"><u><span style="color: blue;">wrote</span></u></a> </span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13.0pt;">that “we're always looking to deliver the highest quality of service for our users, and so we built this server to port our software stack to Power.” This means future applications we can’t imagine our personal Google machines performing, today. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiN9z5BgQvAxmIjWmE-IiM42rPuuRajn1MV3RGw5oZNa5vF5YiyjuvqMq1w2yHePThnMcB_u0PovWcQP31E-BwPs3eYUipJYbHe722o5gN9XqJ56I5EoDoKh4F_KY1EtFLAF0vf55f0C5jV/s1600/google_power8_motherboard.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiN9z5BgQvAxmIjWmE-IiM42rPuuRajn1MV3RGw5oZNa5vF5YiyjuvqMq1w2yHePThnMcB_u0PovWcQP31E-BwPs3eYUipJYbHe722o5gN9XqJ56I5EoDoKh4F_KY1EtFLAF0vf55f0C5jV/s1600/google_power8_motherboard.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Google's Power 8 motherboard</td></tr></tbody></table></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13.0pt;">Building a server-class processor is prohibitively expensive. OpenPOWER gives more companies and different industries enterprise-level capability that would otherwise cost 100s of millions of dollars to develop. Foundation members NVIDIA is already seeing </span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Mincho"; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><a href="http://www.zdnet.com/ibm-intros-next-gen-power8-microprocessor-servers-along-with-openpower-roadmap-7000028605/"><u><span style="color: blue;">improvement</span></u></a></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13.0pt;"> in their analytics applications; and Mellanox </span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Mincho"; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><a href="http://inside-bigdata.com/2014/04/30/mellanox-40-gigabit-ethernet-interconnect-ibm-power8-enable-high-velocity-infrastructures-nosql-databases-memory-data-grids/"><u><span style="color: blue;">reported</span></u></a></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13.0pt;"> a 10x increase in application throughput over their 40GbE adapters and switches. More than 25 other OpenPOWER members are testing their creativity, too.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13.0pt;">For its part, IBM’s cloud and Watson solutions run Power 8. And over time, the company hopes that OpenPOWER will create inclusive, creative opportunities for what were previously only high-end options.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div>

big data google nvidia openpower Power8 Making Power Open to the Enterprising Masses

Since its development in the 1990s, IBM Power Systems served databases. They crunched big data for big business better than anyone else in t...