At the initial OpenPower Summit last year, the industry consortium innovating around the open-sourced Power processor architecture had fewer than 20 systems on display on the stage and about 130 members on the roster. At the second annual event last week, as officials with the OpenPower Foundation stood at the podium, there were more than three times the number of systems—from servers to network switches to development boards—displayed on a series of tables across the stage. IBM in late 2013 open sourced its Power processor architecture, hoping to expand the reach of the technology into a broader range of data center systems. Intel currently controls more than 95 percent of the data center chip space, but industry analysts say enterprises and service providers are looking for a second source of silicon to help drive competition, control pricing and offer protection against supply chain issues. Now with 200 members and more than 2,300 applications that run on Linux on OpenPower, the OpenPower Foundation is working to push ARM aside and become that second supplier. Calista Redmond, foundation president and director of OpenPower alliances at IBM, noted that a recent survey found that 88 percent of high-performance computing (HPC) organizations expect to use more than one silicon platform in their environments. "It's an important time for us to talk about multiple architectures," Redmond said during her address at the summit. akes a look at some of the systems on display at the event.
- eWeek