OpenPOWER Foundation Unveils New Hardware Offerings 

The OpenPOWER Foundation today announced more than ten hardware solutions – spanning systems, boards, and cards, and a new microprocessor customized for China.  Built collaboratively by OpenPOWER members, the new solutions exploit the POWER architecture to provide more choice, customization and performance to customers, including hyperscale data centers.

The OpenPOWER Foundation which is a collaboration of technologists encouraging the adoption of an open server architecture for computer data centers has grown to more than 110 businesses, organizations and individuals across 22 countries. IBM's POWER architecture is the cornerstone of innovation for the OpenPOWER Foundation, creating a computing platform available to all.

Members and customers recognize the technical benefits of the POWER architecture. The POWER8 microprocessor is the first processor designed from the ground up for Big Data and analytics workloads. With the best of breed alternative chip estimated to be priced 50% higher (1), the POWER8 processor utilized by OpenPOWER members and others can enable the design of systems that deliver better performance (2) – projected at nearly 60% (3) better performance per dollar spent on processors.

"Since our first public event just under one year ago, the OpenPOWER Foundation has expanded dramatically and enabled the development of a new breed of data center technology products worldwide," said Gordon MacKean, OpenPOWER Foundation Chair. "Through our members' individual and collective efforts we are positively changing the game, delivering innovations that advance data center technology, expand choice and drive market efficiency."

Among the products and prototypes OpenPOWER members revealed today are:

• Prototype of IBM's first OpenPOWER high performance computing server on the path to exascale – IBM and Wistron are jointly developing the first OpenPOWER-based high performance computing server using technology from NVIDIA and Mellanox. The system will be the debut offering in a series of solutions to be introduced as part of IBM's OpenPOWER technical computing roadmap, which includes IBM's future delivery of two systems to Lawrence Livermore and Oak Ridge National Laboratories. The systems are predicted to be five to 10 times faster than today's leading supercomputers.
• First commercially available OpenPOWER server, the TYAN TN71-BP012 – With planned availability in the second quarter of 2015, the TYAN TN71-BP012 servers are designed for large-scale cloud deployments and follow Tyan's highly successful OpenPOWER customer reference system introduced in October 2014. IBM will be among the first to deploy the new servers as part of its SoftLayer infrastructure, utilizing them for a new bare metal service offering.
• First GPU-accelerated OpenPOWER developer platform, the Cirrascale RM4950 – The Cirrascale RM4950 is the result of collaboration between NVIDIA, Tyan and one of the OpenPOWER Foundation's newest members, Cirrascale. Immediately available for order and shipping in volume in the second quarter of 2015, the platform supports the development of GPU-accelerated big data analytics, deep learning, and scientific computing applications.
• Open server specification and motherboard mock-up combining OpenPOWER, Open Compute and OpenStack – Rackspace, a managed cloud company, revealed an open server design and prototype motherboard, combining OpenPOWER and Open Compute design concepts. The new design, targeted to run OpenStack services and be deployed in Rackspace data centers, will draw upon a wide range of open innovations to deliver users improved performance, value, and features.