It’s well-known by now that big data represents one of the biggest developments the business world has seen in years. Offering the power to take all the data a company generates and derive actionable insights from it, big data can make companies operate even better. A slate of new developments from the OpenPOWER Foundation —of which IBM is just one member among many—look to make this already powerful new system even better by speeding it up.
Founded in 2013, with a focus on fundamentally altering the data center’s approach to technology, the OpenPOWER Foundation puts the POWER CPU system platform, along with relevant processors, to work as part of everyday operations. Several different platform types fall under this umbrella, ranging from systems specifically developed for data centers to the use of the graphics processor unit (GPU), field-programmable gate array (FPGA) or advanced input/output systems for appliances. The OpenPOWER Foundation itself is open to any company that wants to push these advances forward. Recently, several new advances emerged in that vein.
As Brad McCredie—who serves as both the OpenPOWER Foundation’s president and an IBM Fellow—put it, “There is a need for systems that provide greater speed to insight -- for data and analytics workloads to help businesses and organization make sense of the data, to outthink competitors as we usher in a new era of Cognitive Computing.” Several major advances were made on that front, including IBM’s new boost to the Watson supercomputer: NVIDIA Tesla K80 GPUs. Such processors represent the best the NVIDIA Tesla Accelerated Computing Platform can offer, and lends boost to Watson’s Retrieve and Rank system, making it 1.7 times faster than normal.
Meanwhile, Xlinix brought out a new agreement with IBM by which the two firms would focus on data center and network function virtualization (NFV) development, and Mellanox announced the first-ever smart network switch, which was poised to offer 10 times’ improvement in system performance. Complete new systems from E4 Computer Engineering and Penguin Computing were unveiled as well, and the list of achievements recently brought forth from OpenPOWER members carried on from there.
Moore’s Law is well known for its optimism, essentially noting that computing power doubles every other year. Computing power doesn’t double in isolation, however, because it requires active development in order to proceed. Organizations like the OpenPOWER Foundation will play a huge role in this development, generating a host of new options for users and a whole new power for data centers. With the data center and big data in steadily growing use worldwide, OpenPOWER Foundation developments should not only pay off in the short term, but also in the long term, drawing in more interest from those on the fence about buying in.
OpenPOWER Foundation developments run the gamut of technology, but in the end, we all come out ahead as new opportunities are made and business has a chance to grow.
VIDEO Edited by
Ken Briodagh
