IBM, Nvidia and Mellanox have announced plans to launch a new European OpenPower design center with the purpose of developing high performance computing (HPC) apps. The center, which will be situated in Montpellier, France, will work alongside the Jülich Supercomputing Center in Germany, which was launched at the end of last year. Unlike the Jülich center, however, this new facility will focus on HPC apps built using the open source Power architecture, as part of the OpenPOWER Foundation.

Focus on the development of high performance computing apps
Developers from all three companies will work together to create the applications using IBM Power CPUs, Nvidia’s Tesla Accelerated Computing Platform and Mellanox’s InfiniBand networking solution. The collaboration will also help software developers learn advanced HPC skills, boosting the development of new technologies in big data to serve customers around the world.

“Our launch of this new center reinforces IBM’s commitment to open-source collaboration and is a next step in expanding the software and solution ecosystem around OpenPower,” said Dave Turek, IBM’s vice president of HPC Market Engagement. “Teaming with Nvidia and Mellanox, the center will allow us to leverage the strengths of each of our companies to extend innovation and bring higher value to our customers around the world,” he added.

An alliance aimed towards Exascale computing
Stefan Kraemer, director of HPC Business Development, EMEA, at NVIDIA added: “Increasing computational performance while minimizing energy consumption is a challenge the industry must overcome in the race to exascale computing. “By providing systems combining IBM Power CPUs with GPU accelerators and the NVIDIA NVLink high-speed GPU interconnect technology, we can help the new Center address both objectives, enabling scientists to achieve new breakthroughs in their research,” Kraemer concluded.

“The new POWER Acceleration and Design Center will help scientists and engineers address the grand challenges facing society in the fields of energy and environment, information and health care using the most advanced HPC architectures and technologies,” said Gilad Shainer, VP marketing, Mellanox. “Mellanox IB networking solutions offer more than a decade of experience building the world’s highest performing networks, and are uniquely based on an offload-architecture. Only Mellanox offloads data movement, management and even data manipulations (for example Message Passing – MPI collective communications) which are performed at the network level, enabling more valuable CPU cycles to be dedicated to the research applications.”

As founding members of the OpenPOWER Foundation, IBM, NVIDIA, and Mellanox share a common vision to bring a class of systems to market faster to tackle today’s big data challenges.