IBM Adds OpenPOWER ISA to Linux Foundation Ecosystem

The Linux Foundation, a nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, recently announced that it will now host the OpenPOWER Foundation project. The project includes IBM’s open POWER Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) and contributed Source Design Implementations required to support data-driven hardware for intensive workloads like Artificial Intelligence (AI).

“The OpenPOWER community has been doing critical work to support the increasing demands of enterprises that are using big data for AI and machine learning workloads. The move to bring these efforts together with the worldwide ecosystem of open source developers across projects at The Linux Foundation will unleash a new level of innovation by giving developers everywhere more access to the tools and technologies that will define the next generation of POWER architecture,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director, The Linux Foundation.

OpenPOWER is the open steward for the Power Architecture and has the support of 350 members, including IBM, Google, Inspur Power Systems, Yadro, Hitachi, Wistron, Mellanox, NVIDIA, and Red Hat. By hosting OpenPOWER at The Linux Foundation, a cross-project, cross-community collaboration, the group said that it will accelerate development of hardware and software to support data-centric systems, by making it available to a growing global audience.

“IBM believes that open collaboration through groups like Linux Foundation is key to delivering value for our clients,” said Ken King, OpenPOWER General Manager, IBM. “With our recent Red Hat acquisition and today’s announcement, IBM becomes the only commercially-available processor vendor and POWER becomes the only architecture that can boast of a completely open system stack, from the foundation of the hardware through the software stack.”