IBM (NYSE: IBM), in collaboration with NVIDIA, and the Julich Supercomputing Center, part of the largest research center in Germany, today announced plans for a new competency center to advance the creation and optimization of research applications on GPU-accelerated OpenPOWER compatible systems.
Born out of the collaborative spirit fostered by the OpenPOWER Foundation and the commitment of these three organizations to advance the high performance computing (HPC) space, the POWER Acceleration and Design Center will be designed to combine the technology expertise of IBM and NVIDIA with the world-class research capabilities of the Julich Supercomputing Center.
In addition to expanding software ecosystems around OpenPOWER, this new collaboration will create opportunities to develop advanced HPC skills and drive the creation of new technologies to bring value to customers globally. Through the creation of the OpenPOWER Foundation, an open development community formed in late 2013 with over 70 members to date, a new ecosystem based on the POWER architecture is emerging that will lead to novel solutions for high-end HPC systems.
"Our plans for launching this new Center reinforces IBM's commitment to foster an open collaboration environment and is our next step in expanding the software ecosystem around OpenPOWER," said Dave Turek, Vice President of Technical Computing OpenPOWER for IBM. "Teaming with NVIDIA and the Julich Supercomputing Center will allow us to leverage each of our strengths to extend innovation and bring value to our customers around the world."
The Center will join together a team of experts from IBM Research & Development Lab in Boblingen (Germany) and IBM Research Zurich (Switzerland), the Julich Supercomputing Center and NVIDIA (Germany).
"Increasing application performance while minimizing energy consumption are challenges the industry faces in the race toward exascale computing," said Stefan Kraemer, director of HPC Business Development EMEA at NVIDIA. "By providing systems combining IBM Power CPUs and NVIDIA's Tesla GPU accelerators via the NVIDIA NVLink high-speed GPU interconnect technology, we can help the new center address both areas, and enable scientists to achieve new milestones in their research."
Professor Thomas Lippert, Director of the Julich Supercomputing Center, stresses: "The POWER Acceleration and Design Center will help scientists and engineers to address the grand challenges facing society in the fields of energy and environment, information and health care using most advanced HPC architectures and technologies."
IBM and Julich have historically maintained a long-standing relationship which resulted in the installation of several generations of Blue Gene systems. Since 2011 IBM and Julich have been collaborating on research on exascale architectures. A similar collaboration between NVIDIA and Julich has existed since 2012. All three organizations – IBM Julich and NVIDIA – are members of the OpenPOWER Foundation. Founding members IBM and NVIDIA share the common vision of bringing a new class of systems to market faster to tackle today's big data challenges.
