OpenPower Looks to Accelerate Enterprise, HPC
At SC15 today, IBM provided a glimpse of its broadening vision for accelerator-assisted computing on Monday (Nov. 16) with announcements at the SC15 conference around Watson, a strategic alliance with FPGA specialist Xilinx, an expanded developer outreach via the SuperVessel program, and new efforts to accelerate the datacenter and a wide variety of applications used in both HPC and the enterprise.
“Accelerators have come to play a dominant role in HPC and we believe the notion of an accelerated datacenter is beginning to creep into the enterprise and will become a dominant factor,” Sumit Gupta, vice president, HPC and OpenPOWER operations at IBM told sister publication HPCwire. The IBM vision encompasses roles for both GPU- and FPGA- accelerated systems integrated with OpenPOWER architecture and taking advantage of CAPI interface. Gupta outlined what he called an ambitious three-pronged effort to accelerate computing, storage and networking.
More than 100 of the TOP500 supercomputers from the list announced this morning rely on GPU acceleration, accounting for a total 143 petaflops – more than one-third of the list’s total FLOPS. NVIDIA Tesla GPU-based supercomputers comprise 70 of these systems – including 23 of the 24 new systems on the list.
See the full report from HPCwire here.
