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."

Comments

Re:How slow will this be?

[Chanc_Gorkon]

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.

too little too late?

[CowbertPrime]

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.

I've got one here

[IGnatius T Foobar]

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.