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 […]
OpenPower conference bears East Asian fruit
OpenPower Foundation members showed off some potentially game-changing new hardware at their first full conference in San Jose, California, last week. The Open Power consortium was formed by IBM in August, 2013, in an attempt to create a renewed ecosystem around its Power processor technology. From four original partners, the group has grown to 110 […]
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 […]
Power/Nvidia combo bags $325m supercomputer order
IBM’s OpenPower alliance with Nvidia has borne its first fruit in the form of a $325 million contract from the U.S. government’s Department of Energy to build two of the world’s fastest supercomputers. A huge Power9 processor-based machine codenamed Summit will be installed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee by 2017. It will […]