Open access cloud boosts development ecosystem

16th June 2015

IBM

Siobhan O'Gorman

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An open access cloud service is now available to the global community of developers who want to participate in the OpenPOWER ecosystem. SuperVessel acts as a virtual R&D engine for the creation, testing and pilot of emerging applications including deep analytics, machine learning and the IoT.

In an announcement at the OpenPOWER Foundation Summit in Beijing, IBM said SuperVessel has attracted thousands of users in the past six months, including developers from the open source community and students from more than 30 universities in China and around the world. OpenPOWER ecosystem partners can leverage SuperVessel to speed up their application development.

Founded in December 2013 by IBM, NVIDIA, Mellanox, Google and Tyan, the OpenPOWER Foundation is a collaboration of technologists encouraging the adoption of an open server architecture for computer data centres.

SuperVessel demonstrates the latest achievements of IBM’s open computing technology. The cloud is based on POWER processors, with FPGAs and GPUs to provide heterogenous acceleration service, and uses OpenStack to manage the whole cloud. SuperVessel is divided into online ‘labs’ where users can access open source software, build and test applications and share experiences and best practices. The labs include Big Data, IoT, acceleration and virtualisation on POWER.

“Xilinx is delighted to have been chosen as the provider of FPGA accelerators for the IBM-developed SuperVessel cloud service," said Hemant Dhulla, Vice President of Data Center and Wired Communications, Xilinx. "FPGA-based compute acceleration is a critical part of the OpenPOWER Foundation vision to handle demanding workloads in the most cost and power-efficient way. For this reason, a CAPI-enabled Xilinx FPGA is attached to every IBM POWER8 node in the SuperVessel cloud. The research and development being done in SuperVessel is helping to define the future of heterogeneous computing.”

"SuperVessel is a significant contribution by IBM Research and Development to OpenPOWER," commented Terri Virnig, Vice President of Power Ecosystem and Strategy, IBM. "Combining advanced technologies from IBM R&D labs and business partners, SuperVessel is becoming the industry's leading OpenPOWER research and development environment. It is a way IBM commits to and supports OpenPOWER ecosystem development, talent growth and research innovation."