POWER Acceleration and Design Center
JSC, IBM and NVIDIA have announced their decision to set up a new competence centre to support scientists and engineers using OpenPOWER technologies and architectures to address problems requiring supercomputing resources. At this lab - the POWER Acceleration and Design Centre - experts from the IBM labs in Böblingen and Rüschlikon as well as from JSC and NVIDIA will combine their efforts to pool know-how and experience on applications, mathematical methods and algorithms, performance analysis and engineering as well as computer architectures.
Last year, a number of companies, including IBM and NVIDIA, announced the establishment of the OpenPOWER Foundation, whose aim is to create an ecosystem for different technologies using the POWER processor architecture. This opened up new opportunities for access to and cooperation on future exascale architectures and technologies, which was one of the main reasons for Forschungszentrum Jülich to join the Foundation in March 2014.
The planned POWER Acceleration and Design Center will work on a set of key applications to push their scalability to new limits on the emerging OpenPOWER HPC architectures. Each graphics processing unit (GPU) features an extreme level of concurrency, which makes it possible to achieve a very high performance per node. With processors and GPUs becoming more closely integrated through a new high-performance bus technology, it is easier for applications to use both the GPU's high bandwidth memory as well as the large capacity memory attached to the processor.
The knowledge created at the new centre will be provided within the OpenPOWER Foundation to enhance future technologies. It will also be made available to application programmers to enable them to make the most efficient use of these technologies for solving their problems, e.g. through courses, training of young scientists, or workshops facilitating the exchange of experience between application developers.
(Contact: Prof. Dirk Pleiter)
from JSC News No. 227, 12 December 2014