Slashdot Mirror
IBM Promoting POWER Systems
A reader writes:"IBM has launched a Open Power Project to
increase awareness around its Open Power product line for Linux.. The
site includes technical information, forums and provides the ability to
tinker w/ Open Power platforms at the University of Augsburg and Peking
University. Both Universities are hosting POWER5-based servers and are
providing free SSH account access to the Open Source development
community. There are rumors of additional Universities to come. They are
also hosting special showings of the War of the Worlds in San Francisco
and NYC. Looks like there are a couple of hundred pairs of free tickets
to each showing on a first come first served basis to those that register."
Realistically I feel that if IBM really want to premote the Power line or processors they will have to have a Apple style lower end system that can be purchased at a reasonable price. That will get people to buy.. Especially if for a time you could run MacOSX Linux, AIX , xBSD and whatever other Operating systems run on the PPC reliably.
Yes but were they Power 5's? I doubt it. The Power5 is VERY fast. We have 3 LPAR's on our system and many processors....one LPAR has 6 dedicated processors and one has 10 processors. Total ram for the system is 106 GB and we split that up between the LPARS.
Gorkman
I think IBM shot themselves in the foot by not working with Apple. One of the main reasons why the PowerPC architecture is so popular is because of Apple. Without Apple selling PowerPC machines in the future, it's going to be difficult for Linux users to get these systems, since not all of us have $5000 for a POWER workstation. nor have many heard of Genesi or Terrasoft.
You kow what I would like to see? If Apple kept supporting PowerPC, but just in Powermacs, that would be great. An even better idea would be if they used proper POWER processors, since those are a superset of PowerPC. Now here's the cool part. To make up for the lack of vector processing goodness due to lack of Altivec, they could offer a Cell processor on a pci-express expansion card, and then just for the hell of it, offer free licenses for AIX with every system. IBM and Apple could wrap the whole thing in a little package and call it The Ultimate Unix/RISC Workstation. They could charge less than one of IBM's workstations, but more than an Intel Powermac. How many of you would buy one of those?
That sounds like an excellent way to sell POWER systems. So you would give them a credit card to put a hold on while you're evaluating the system and if you like it you keep it and they charge you... if not you send it back with a modest 10% restocking fee. I like it.
Interesting, because the AIX-based RS/6000s my school used for remote access (they're still running, though less used than when I was there) were multi-processor 112MHz PowerPC machines (7013-J30, and 7013-J40).
These handled the load VERY well, and even could handle MULTIPLE remote-X sessions of Pro/Engineer (serious CAD software) across the campus network to the dorms. Maybe hardware or maybe just AIX, but they could certanly handle a beating and keep on ticking responsively.
Clock for clock, for pure computational demands, very little beats 64bit POWER architecture with real vector instructions. I'd definitely like to see IBM sell something like an apple xserve for us relatively poor scientists who want POWER for doing lots of raw number crunching: fft and molecular dynamics in particular.
We've got an OpenPOWER 720 in our data center as part of IBM's push to get everyone to try it out, and let me tell you, this architecture is fast. Blazingly fast. From the zippy CPU's to the efficient bus design, it just crunches through the most demanding data tasks effortlessly.
There are some caveats, though. One is that it does run hot. I wouldn't recommend keeping this type of machine running anywhere other than an air conditioned data center. You can feel the hot air blasting out the front of the chassis. The other thing is that because it's designed for virtualization, getting it booted up can be somewhat cumbersome. It actually requires a separate computer (an ordinary PC, as shipped) to run the software that configures partitions and manages the boot process.
Other than that, though, this is a great way to get a smaller version of what "big iron" can deliver, at a decent price.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!