Power8 processors pack over twice the punch of their x86 counterparts when it comes to running financial applications. Those were the findings presented by IBM to the benchmarking organisation STAC earlier this month. The STAC Summit in London attracted banking tech experts from all over Europe who heard how a Power8-based system set new performance […]
SuperVessel launch shows OpenPower’s promise
IBM’s announcement this month of SuperVessel, a free cloud for OpenPower research, was significant for a number of reasons. Firstly, it was made at the OpenPower Foundation Summit, held the week before last in China’s capital, Beijing. This, in itself, was important. Sales of IBM Power Systems all but dried up in China after Edward […]
Power8 gets more acceleration, new compilers
Altera has unveiled new accelerators for Power chips and Nvidia is to introduce compilers to run x86 Linux apps on the processors more easily. Silicon Valley-based Altera makes field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) that are used to speed up processing (pictured). It announced support for IBM’s OpenPower Foundation in November, 2013, and is listed as a […]
IBM & Nvidea team with top German HPC centre
As well as landing a mega deal from the U.S. government, IBM and Nvidia have teamed up with Germany’s Jülich Supercomputing Centre. Together, they plan to set up the POWER Acceleration and Design Centre to “advance the creation and optimisation of research applications on GPU-accelerated OpenPower-compatible systems”. The Centre will bring experts together from the […]