New OpenPOWER Technologies to Break Big Data Speed Barriers

IBM made its announcements at an IBM and OpenPower Accelerating Innovation event in Austin, Texas, where they previewed the next iteration of the Watson cognitive computing system architecture.

IBM will develop and qualify Xilinx accelerator boards into IBM Power Systems servers.

E4 Computer Engineering and Penguin Computing launched new systems based on OpenPOWER designs using IBM’s Power8 processors and Nvidia’s GPUs.

See the full report from HPCwire here.

IBM ported Internet of things, big data and cognitive applications to OpenPOWER. OpenPower effort was launched by IBM to reduce Intel’s dominance in the data centre. Such processors represent the best the NVIDIA Tesla Accelerated Computing Platform can offer, and lends boost to Watson’s Retrieve and Rank system, making it 1.7 times faster than normal. This speed-up can further improve the cost-performance of Watson’s cloud-based services.

“For example, if a call center agent is responding to an individual’s health and insurance query, the agent will be able to leverage Watson’s natural language processing technology to obtain an answer in real-time even faster and cheaper than before”, Rob High, IBM fellow and IBM Watson chief technology officer, in a blog post discussing the changes. He told us IBM has put a great deal of effort into highlighting the value that its Power Systems and Power processor technologies offer in comparison to Intel CPUs.

IBM and Xilinx will develop open acceleration infrastructures, software and middleware to address emerging applications such as machine learning, network functions virtualization (NFV), genomics, high performance computing (HPC) and big data analytics.

The two companies have signed a private multi-year agreement through OpenPOWER Foundation, which will enable Xilinx programmable chips known as FPGAs to work with IBM’s Power processors and hence promote the IBM product. Organizations like the OpenPOWER Foundation will play a huge role in this development, generating a host of new options for users and a whole new power for data centers. IBM said the new cluster is now running successfully in an early user mode, and will begin accepting requests for access sometime this week.

Several IBM clients understand firsthand how the coupling of accelerator technologies with POWER processors can and are delivering breakthrough performance to enable industries to transform. Today, the team revealed that the feat was achieved using Power Systems accelerated with NVIDIA Tesla GPUs and Mellanox network infrastructure to build a 3-D map of the human genome and model the reaction of the genome to this surgical procedure, without disturbing the surrounding DNA.

The firm said that the GPU acceleration increases Watson’s processing performance by a factor of 10.