First Annual Open Power Summit 2015

March 2015 – Held concurrently with the Nvidia GTC event, the Open Power Consortium held their first Annual Summit. The presentation focused on their growing membership, software products and more importantly the release of new hardware for the platform that were developed in the past 12 months. The theme for the event, as presented by Open Power Chairman Gordon MacKean, was “Rethinking the Data Center”. This rethinking is the result of the end of Moore’s law as the primary driver of improvements, as the cost/performance path is diminishing for scaling only. This is driving the need for developing new architectures and software to advance throughput with the current generation devices.

The Open Power Consortium started with 5 founding members and now has over 113 members and growing.to 113 members as of the summit presentation. These members cover the full breadth of the supply chain from SOC to HPC and all of the endpoints & infrastructure in between. At the summit, 15 new hardware products were introduced in this space.

The group is not just focusing on technology innovation; it is also looking at business model innovation. The key point is to develop a business accessible supply chain platform that is open to partners and components on a global basis. As a major partner Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, presented that the Open Power program is supported by the full Ubuntu OS and multiple specialty apps. Additionally, Ubuntu is the only OS to support Power8 and provide both CAPI (Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface) and PowerNV support. They also introduced that Ubuntu JuJu for service orchestration was supporting the Power platform. Juju is a GUI that is designed as a service orchestration tool that lets you build entire cloud environments with only a few commands. It supports a range of applications that span from deploying OpenStack itself, a workload on public or private clouds, or even directly on bare metal using MAAS.

The summit continued with presentations on the hardware products, debuggers and other software tools and application software. These solutions are part of the working groups inside the consortium.  At this time the group is focused on HPC applications, but is looking to migrate and address Data Centers and the Enterprise.

Open Power group structure