The OpenPower Foundation, an IBM Corp.-led initiative that aims to build server, networking, storage and graphics acceleration technologies for hyperscale and cloud data centers, is targeting European expansion as the next stage of its growth.

The consortium said at its inaugural OpenPower European Summit in Barcelona this week, that it has already gained significant traction in North America and China. Now, in an effort to repeat that growth in Europe, members of the foundation have announced a series of new OpenPower projects on the continent, several new OpenPower-based offerings aimed at improving the performance of modern workloads like artificial intelligence and data analytics, and a new OpenPower developer cloud for use by European organizations.

With the new launches, it’s clear that IBM and OpenPower won’t be satisfied with merely serving as a rival to Intel Corp.’s data center architecture. They want to become the processor architecture of choice for data-intensive enterprises.

“Commodity platforms are proving ineffective when it comes to ingesting and making sense of the 2.5 billion GBs of data being created daily,” Calista Redmond, president of the OpenPower Foundation, said in a statement. “With today’s announcements by our European members, the OpenPower Foundation expands its reach, bringing open-source, high-performing, flexible and scalable solutions to organizations worldwide.”

IBM and OpenPower still have some way to go. Intel’s chips currently power about 95 percent of servers in use today. But that only serves to highlight how much organizations could benefit from having a choice of architectures when it comes to driving innovation and reducing costs. And IBM, with the backing of its 270-member OpenPower Foundation, is fighting hard to provide that choice.

OpenPower has already made some inroads into Europe. Last year for example, France’s GENCI high-performance computing agency announced it was adopting OpenPower solutions for its data center operations. But there’s still a long way to go.

GENCI was one of several new projects announced yesterday aimed at addressing the push towards exascale computing with the help of OpenPower designs and technologies. In a second project, graphics processor unit chipmaker NVIDIA Corp. is teaming up with IBM and the Juelich Supercomputing Center to provide a pilot supercomputer called “Juron” for use by the Human Brain Project. The supercomputer is powered by IBM’s S822LC chip for HPC, relies on NVIDIA’s NVLink interconnect technology, and also research offerings from several OpenPower members.

In a second project, the Turkey-based SC3 Electronics supercomputing center is creating a large HPC cluster based on IBM’s OpenPower LC servers, while the Barcelona Supercomputing Center is also using OpenPower tech for its work at the IBM-BSC Deep Learning Center.

As for the new developer cloud, this is based on the Supervessel developer cloud that was launched in China earlier this year. It’s designed to provide developers and students with open and remote access to supercomputing capabilities. It will launch later this year.

Image credit: OpenPower Foundation via Facebook