Continuing its campaign to stoke enthusiasm for its OpenPower processor, IBM today made several announcements:

Field-programmable gate array (FPGA) maker Xilinx Inc. has joined the OpenPower Foundation at the platinum level and will join the foundation’s board. IBM and Xilinx also announced a partnership to enable higher performance workload acceleration on Power systems.

IBM also announced tests documenting acceleration of Watson on OpenPower silicon combining the Power 8 CPU with Nvidia Corp.  GPU accelerators, important for handling video as part of Big Data analysis. It also announced that OpenPower silicon incorporating the Mellanox Technologies‘ smart network Switch-IB-2 can deliver a tenfold performance improvement over switches incorporating other processors. Nvidia and Mellanox were founding members of the OpenPower Foundation.

A research team led by geneticist and computer scientist Erez Lieberman Aiden, affiliated with Baylor College and Rice University, said it used Power systems accelerated with Nvidia GPUs and Mellanox switches to do nationally recognized research on the three-dimensional structure of the human genome.

Other announcements include:

• Establishment of a new Power8 accelerated computing cluster at the University of Texas at Austin,
• An expansion of the Power8 systems footprint at Oregon State University’s Open Source Lab (OSUSOSL),
• Release of a white paper by Louisiana State University documenting how a Power8-based server using acceleration technology rendered 750 percent to 900 percent performance increases compared to an Intel Xeon-based LSU HPC server.

IBM said the Foundation is developing open acceleration infrastructures, software and middleware to address emerging applications such as machine learning, network functions virtualization, genomics, high-performance computing and Big Data analytics.

One question around the future of OpenPower is Google. It was one of the founders of the foundation, and the implication at the time was that it would become a customer for servers based on OpenPower chips incorporating the Nvidia and Mellanox technologies. Google remains an active member of the OpenPower foundation but has not made any public commitment to using the processors

Image courtesy OpenPOWER Foundation.