OpenPOWER Gains Momentum Heading into Second Year

PISCATAWAY, N.J., Dec. 16, 2014 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- One year after its formation, the OpenPOWER Foundation today announced continued membership growth and increasing momentum in open server product design and development with dozens of products introduced and under development. The organization's members, now 80 strong worldwide and growing, are expected to continue this momentum with new systems, solutions and deployments planned for 2015.

A full slate of development activities are planned through the OpenPOWER Foundation work groups as well as collaborative member projects. For example, currently 12 members are designing OpenPOWER systems, and several universities are conducting research with OpenPOWER based technologies.  These projects and other member work underway build upon a growing set of OpenPOWER compatible solutions introduced in the last quarter of 2014 including:

• Nallatech collaboration with Altera produced the OpenPOWER CAPI Developer Kit for IBM POWER8, announced November 10.
• Tyan launched the TYAN GN70-BP010, the world's first OpenPOWER customer reference system, announced on October 8.
• NVIDIA and IBM collaboration produced the IBM Power S824L server with GPU acceleration, announced on October 3.
• Redis Labs, Altera, Canonical and IBM collaboration produced the IBM Data Engine for NoSQL, a CAPI-enabled solution for NoSQL data stores, announced on October 3

"We're very excited with what we've accomplished over the past year, not just in terms of our expanding roster but as measured by our ability to tap into the unique talents each member brings to our growing community of innovators," said OpenPOWER Chairman Gordon MacKean. "We wanted to make OpenPOWER a community where industry leaders could easily leverage one another's capabilities and technology to address the performance bottlenecks of today's servers. Our progress towards that goal becomes more evident with each new solution made available by our members and our success is highlighted by the performance gains demonstrated by these different solutions."

OpenPOWER Charters Sixth Work Group

To support a wide range of technical development efforts, the OpenPOWER Foundation's Technical Steering Committee has chartered six work groups.  The latest one formed addresses interoperability, allowing different server component technologies to work together.  Named the 25G IO Interoperability Mode Work Group, this new work group focuses on physical interfaces -- the wiring that connects componentry -- and will provide members a forum to work out an interoperability mode for custom 25Gbps PHYs. 

The interoperability work group joins the previously established Systems Software, OpenServer Development Platform, Hardware Architecture, Compliance and Accelerator work groups. Additional work group charters are under development, including one that will address open source application software. 

Newest Members Expand OpenPOWER Areas of Expertise

In twelve months, OpenPOWER has grown from 5 founders to 80 members worldwide. OpenPOWER's newest members join a diverse set of leaders from across the technology industry from cloud service providers and technology consumers to chip designers, hardware components, system vendors and firmware and software providers and beyond. 

Today, Rackspace becomes the latest member to join OpenPOWER, bringing new expertise and perspective to OpenPOWER.  A leading managed cloud company, Rackspace is active in open server design and plays a leading role in the Open Compute Project and OpenStack®.

"Rackspace has been working with OpenPOWER founders for more than 18 months, and we are excited to officially join the OpenPOWER Foundation," said Aaron Sullivan, senior director and distinguished engineer, infrastructure strategy at Rackspace. "OpenPOWER brings an increasingly open firmware stack, and deeper access to chips, memory, and storage than anywhere else. This is unprecedented, and it invites the open source community to participate at all layers.  It's our vision that OpenPOWER enables OpenStack and Open Compute developers to work all the way down the stack. Where Open Compute opened and revolutionized data center hardware and OpenStack opened up cloud software and infrastructure-as-a-service, OpenPOWER is doing the same for the last black boxes in our servers: chips, buses and firmware."

The addition of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories along with the world renowned academic institutions Tsinghua University and the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay broadens the organization's span of expertise and implementation in the areas of research, applied science and academia. 

OpenPOWER also welcomes Avnet, a leading global technology distributor. As a provider of global channel distribution and integration services, Avnet can expose OpenPOWER compatible offerings to a broader range of clients worldwide in variety of industries.

"While the open source movement has largely focused on innovations driven by software, we recognize that there is a tremendous opportunity to drive even more exciting technology breakthroughs by fostering open collaboration at all levels of design, including hardware development," said Tony Madden, Avnet global supplier business executive. "Collaboration in the OpenPOWER Foundation enables Avnet customers to drive more options to differentiate their next-generation server and storage systems."

A current list of members is available on the OpenPOWER website.

First OpenPOWER Summit Takes Place in March

Plans are underway for the first OpenPOWER Summit, a conference and exhibition that will be held March 17-19, 2015, at the San Jose Convention Center in California. The three-day event will feature a keynote from OpenPOWER Chairman Gordon MacKean, member presentations, and an OpenPOWER exhibitor pavilion where members will be demonstrating their latest advancements in OpenPOWER based applications, platforms and research while networking with industry peers.

Registration and further details about the event are available at www.openpowerfoundation.org/2015-summit.

About the OpenPOWER Foundation

Founded in December 2013,the OpenPOWER Foundation is a global, independent technical membership organization formed to facilitate and inspire collaborative innovation on the POWER architecture. The OpenPOWER Foundation enables members to customize POWER CPU processors, system platforms, firmware and middleware software for optimization for their business and organizational needs. Member innovations delivered and under development include custom systems for large or warehouse scale data centers, workload acceleration through GPU, FPGA or advanced I/O, and platform optimization for software appliances, or advanced hardware technology exploitation.

Media Contact:
Kristin Bryson
OpenPOWER Media Relations
office: 914-766-4221, mobile: 203-241-9190
email: [email protected]

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SOURCE OpenPOWER Foundation