IBM Launches New Linux, Power8, OpenPower Systems (zdnet.com)

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IBM Launches New Linux, Power8, OpenPower Systems (zdnet.com)

Posted by msmash on Thursday September 8, 2016 @05:20AM from the big-data-workloads dept.

An anonymous reader writes:IBM on Thursday rolled out its latest Power8 processor, which is designed to move data faster, and new servers with OpenPower features. For IBM, the OpenPower Foundation community is critical for its Power8 processor. A bevy of companies are in OpenPower, a group that aims to be a counterweight to x86-based servers. With the new systems, IBM is hoping to target more artificial intelligence, analytics, and deep learning workloads. The systems will be lumped into the Power Systems LC family of Linux servers. Big Blue's Power S822LC for High Performance Computing server is the headliner of the group, with the Power8 processor with Nvidia's Tesla P100 Pascal GPUs. The system also has Nvidia's NVLink processor that allows for high-speed bidirectional interconnects. IBM said the combination of IBM and Nvidia technology allows data to flow five times faster than an x86-based system.

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Not again! by Anonymous Coward · 2016-09-08 05:21 · Score: 0

Remember Sparc?
1. Re:Not again! by ArchieBunker · 2016-09-08 06:06 · Score: 1
  
  Sparc is still around surprisingly and Oracle is selling tons of systems.
  
  --
  Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
2. Re:Not again! by Anonymous Coward · 2016-09-08 06:59 · Score: 0
  
  Funny thing is that China is manufacturing new processors based on Sparc and Alpha. The top 1 supercomputer right now is based Chinese made Alpha processors
  The ability of a centrally planned economy to take advantage of the waste of a capitalist society should not be discounted
3. Re:Not again! by jellomizer · 2016-09-08 07:58 · Score: 1
  
  The real question is are these alternate chips that are x times faster than the competitor (x-y) times the price.
  I loved my UltraSparc Ultra 10 Work Station, back in the early 2000's. However I had moved over to intel, because the performance/price just wasn't there.
  If the power8 is 5x the speed of intel. however if it costs 6x as much... Is that speed boost really worth it. Or just get additional Intels to do the work.
  Also we can get into the complex discussion of CPU performance specifications. Where each devices is particularly designed to do different jobs better than others, combined with the fact that you will need programs optimized for those CPU to get the performance gains...
  
  --
  If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
4. Re:Not again! by Darinbob · 2016-09-08 08:04 · Score: 1
  
  Yes, what's wrong with Sparc?
5. Re:Not again! by Anonymous Coward · 2016-09-08 08:49 · Score: 0
  
  Nobody said Oracle buyers were smart...
6. Re: Not again! by hackwrench · 2016-09-08 08:50 · Score: 2
  
  People like to talk in absolutes, though. Central planning is always bad or always good. Capitalism is always bad or always good. Vaccines are always good or they cause autism and you won't like hugs. Instead we should be looking out for appropriate use cases and look for potential problems and where they crop up with everything.
7. Re: Not again! by Anonymous Coward · 2016-09-08 09:10 · Score: 0
  
  Well there are problems that cannot be faster with higher concurrency so throwing more Intels won't help.
8. Re:Not again! by unixisc · 2016-09-08 10:57 · Score: 1
  
  Which Alpha processor is that?
9. Re:Not again! by unixisc · 2016-09-08 11:09 · Score: 1
  
  Reason is that the RISC companies toss in peripheral circuitry that transmit the enhanced performance throughout the system. That's why SPARC or POWER or MIPS had proprietary peripheral circuitry that matched the speed, and w/ it, the cost of that increases. Also, toss in the fact that RISC systems never had the economics of scale - not even the Itanium - and the story is complete!
  I'm more interested in the OS side of things - how IBM has totally gone Linux. It would have been nice had IBM offered the choice of Linux or FreeBSD/TrueOS
10. Re:Not again! by RicktheBrick · 2016-09-08 13:25 · Score: 1
  
  IBM is behind World Community Grid. They have contributed about 250 million results. They are not slowing down either. If one could produce these results at say a nickel a result in electricity cost than they have spent an additional 12.5 million dollars. But they are still asking for volunteers to produce results which should be a lot cheaper for them to produce themselves. Their cloud business should be able do this without much problems. Their must be a reason why they are still pushing distributed computing in a world where cloud computing is also being pushed. Super computers today are doing over 100 times what all the members of WCG can hope to accomplish. I would think IBM could get a government grant to help in the cost too.
11. Re:Not again! by dwywit · 2016-09-08 15:26 · Score: 1
  
  As far as I'm aware, they also offer i or OS400/whatever it's called these days.
  
  --
  They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
12. Re:Not again! by vbraga · 2016-09-08 16:29 · Score: 1
  
  ShenWei, which the press reported as being very similar to the Alpha. https://laotsao.wordpress.com/...
  
  --
  English is not my first language. Corrections and suggestions are welcome.
13. Re: Not again! by malditaenvidia · 2016-09-09 10:23 · Score: 1
  
  Did you just try to sneak anti-vaccine propaganda in a conversation about IBM operating systems, you underhanded asshole?
14. Re: Not again! by hackwrench · 2016-09-10 07:25 · Score: 1
  
  No. I tried to sneak lyrics from Tim Minchin's The Fence into a conversation about whatever the conversation has drifted to. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
All Important Question by Anonymous Coward · 2016-09-08 05:41 · Score: 1

SystemD ?
1. Re:All Important Question by unixisc · 2016-09-08 11:13 · Score: 1
  
  I was curious about that as well - would IBM offer a systemd free system? It could have, had they offered something like FreeBSD on this baby
POWER9 must be far away by Freedom+Bug · 2016-09-08 05:53 · Score: 1

They pre-announced POWER9 a couple of weeks ago. So new POWER8 announcements are kind of a let down. Obviously POWER9 must be a ways away, then. You've got to move fast to have any chance of competing with Intel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
1. Re:POWER9 must be far away by rijrunner · 2016-09-08 06:20 · Score: 2
  
  This is fairly standard. They usually hit their + or express version at the midpoint between major updates. The timeline for this looks to be very much in line with their previous releases. Three calendar years between major releases with a + version about halfway between.
Can Slashdot stop post IBM advertisements? by Anonymous Coward · 2016-09-08 05:55 · Score: 0

IBM is a terrible business, charging 10-20 times more for losing products. Its POWER chips are about 5 years behind the latest Intel chips. When will it go bankruptcy?
1. Re:Can Slashdot stop post IBM advertisements? by Narcocide · 2016-09-08 06:08 · Score: 2
  
  This is gonna change some shit man. The success of the Raspberry Pi has proven that CPU performance is not everything.
2. Re:Can Slashdot stop post IBM advertisements? by OrangeTide · 2016-09-08 06:22 · Score: 1
  
  These days (really for the last decade) the one with the best fab has the highest performance chips and it has little to do with the CPU instruction set.
  
  --
  “Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
3. Re:Can Slashdot stop post IBM advertisements? by Anonymous Coward · 2016-09-08 07:05 · Score: 1
  
  Thank you for your contribution, Pajeet. Your custom Intel t-shirt will be sent out within 3 business days.
4. Re:Can Slashdot stop post IBM advertisements? by blane.bramble · 2016-09-08 07:27 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  Meanwhile, in the real world, most systems are not CPU bound but IO bound. If Power8 lives up to the hype, it's a very interesting prospect.
  Summary: go back to Call of Duty.
5. Re:Can Slashdot stop post IBM advertisements? by Darinbob · 2016-09-08 08:05 · Score: 1
  
  When will Slashdot stop being an apologist for creaky old Intel designs?
6. Re:Can Slashdot stop post IBM advertisements? by cheesybagel · 2016-09-08 10:10 · Score: 1
  
  You don't have a clue what you are talking about. POWER has high performance. It's just expensive like heck. But then again their clients are willing to pay the price.
  It was the first processor with large embedded DRAM caches that I can think of. It has 4-way SMT, decimal floating point, hardware transactional memory, and gobs of memory bandwidth.
  It's not optimized for low-power operation though. It's for people who care about performance and backwards compatibility with legacy IBM hardware.
7. Re:Can Slashdot stop post IBM advertisements? by Anonymous Coward · 2016-09-08 11:03 · Score: 0
  
  Actually Power-8 has 8 way SMT, but this is a bit of marketing kludge (no real throughput increase above 4). Power9 will have 4 or 8 way depending on versions, as well as quad precision floating point.
8. Re:Can Slashdot stop post IBM advertisements? by Dadoo · 2016-09-08 11:04 · Score: 1
  
  Meanwhile, in the real world, most systems are not CPU bound but IO bound.
  Seriously. According to IBM's literature, entry-level pSeries systems do 96GBps per socket. I don't know of any Intel-based systems that can even touch that, in the price range they're talking about.
  I wonder if their process synchronization/IPC is faster, too.
  
  --
  Sit, Ubuntu, sit. Good dog.
9. Re:Can Slashdot stop post IBM advertisements? by unixisc · 2016-09-08 11:28 · Score: 1
  
  I thought that IBM is out of the business of making computers, and is just an expensive alternative to the likes of Accenture, HCL, Cognizant and so on
10. Re:Can Slashdot stop post IBM advertisements? by unixisc · 2016-09-08 11:29 · Score: 1
  
  I thought that from POWER7 starting onwards, they were optimized for low power, since that's been the mantra of computing ever since multicore burst on the scene.
11. Re:Can Slashdot stop post IBM advertisements? by Anonymous Coward · 2016-09-08 12:40 · Score: 0
  
  No. IBM is out of the business of making cheap, consumer grade computers. -PCP
12. Re: Can Slashdot stop post IBM advertisements? by Anonymous Coward · 2016-09-09 20:49 · Score: 0
  
  it is when you're selling them for high performance computing.
More details? by Anonymous Coward · 2016-09-08 06:12 · Score: 0

Maybe I missed something. What flow rate are they referring too? I felt like this was a shill piece for IBM with the format being: new chip, bidirectional flow, quote so metric without context, say big data and today's cloud euphemism. Then we're all supposed to say yay IBM or Power something.
I admit I don't understand. But then, I think this journalist doesn't either. It'd be nice if he explained a bit more. Are these computationally faster? Do they have a higher bus throughput?
1. Re:More details? by TheSunborn · 2016-09-08 06:20 · Score: 2
  
  They are talking about the flow of data, between the PowerPC cpu and the nVidia graphics card. It's fast because they are using a special nVidia link, but I don't really think this matters a lot in most use cases.
  Btw: The cheepest version comes with 2 cpus each with 8 cores, and cost over 9000$.
2. Re:More details? by Anonymous Coward · 2016-09-08 06:27 · Score: 0
  
  PowerPC and POWER are not the same things.
3. Re:More details? by Anonymous Coward · 2016-09-08 06:39 · Score: 0
  
  It matters most in cases where the dataset is larger than the GPU memory footprint (16GB), because the GPU can fetch from system memory at CPU speeds, instead of PCIe speeds. Practically speaking, it opens new workloads (especially highly parallel workloads) to GPU acceleration that simply would not have made sense before.
4. Re:More details? by unixisc · 2016-09-08 11:17 · Score: 1
  
  Yeah, for starters, who fabs this CPU? How many cores does it have, and how does it compare to the various Xeons? Or even an Itanium? Will we see it in the next Watson? Also, which other vendors will be using this CPU to make their systems?
5. Re:More details? by unixisc · 2016-09-08 11:18 · Score: 1
  
  Is there any PowerPC left anymore? I thought it disappeared when Apple dropped the PowerMacs, and more so later when Apple bought PAsemi
6. Re:More details? by dbIII · 2016-09-08 15:44 · Score: 1
  
  but I don't really think this matters a lot in most use cases.
  For most use cases the Power is vastly overpriced so you get it only for those use cases for things like feeding a pile of nvidia cards for numerical processing.
  There are a lot of situations in cluster computing where that is useful and the number of situations is increasing as the onboard memory on those cards increases.
  Currently on x86_64 systems there's a lot of situations where feeding the cards takes as much time as it would to solve the problem on the base hardware with a huge pool of local memory. This faster link will get around that in some cases.
7. Re:More details? by damnbunni · 2016-09-08 17:42 · Score: 1
  
  NXP (formerly Freescale) and AMCC are still making PowerPC-based chips, mostly for embedded applications.
8. Re:More details? by Anonymous Coward · 2016-09-08 19:02 · Score: 0
  
  Global Foundries. They have 12 cores. Each core has 8-way threading. They hit clock speeds above 4 GHz. CPU performance per core per MHz is comparable to -- sometimes a little better, sometimes a little worse -- high-end Xeons. They really shine in having extremely fast IO.
  You can buy systems from IBM, Tyan, and a few others.
Price? by MachineShedFred · 2016-09-08 06:15 · Score: 3, Insightful

So that's great that data can flow 5x what an x86 server can do. Does it cost 10x as much? Because if it does, you're likely better off with x86.

--
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
1. Re:Price? by Anonymous Coward · 2016-09-08 06:23 · Score: 1
  
  The processor on the open market is reasonably priced, at least the 8 core/64 threads version at the lowest frequency/power dissipation.
2. Re:Price? by Anonymous Coward · 2016-09-08 06:58 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  So that's great that data can flow 5x what an x86 server can do. Does it cost 10x as much? Because if it does, you're likely better off with x86.
  Because electricity and cooling are both free, right?
  If the one bottleneck on your workload is GPU bandwidth, if it's 5x faster, but only 10x as expensive, it's probably a LOT cheaper to buy and run the one POWER than the five x86s over the lifetime of the servers, assuming the x86 boxes draw about same amount of power as one POWER server.
3. Re:Price? by rijrunner · 2016-09-08 07:04 · Score: 2
  
  My experience is that 10x as much is a very generous estimate. It is often worse.
4. Re:Price? by Anonymous Coward · 2016-09-08 07:48 · Score: 0
  
  If you work on IBM Power (I do), you will have been told for years that their "Linux Only" Power servers are competitive, even cheaper, than x86.
  You can't run AIX on them though.
5. Re:Price? by Anonymous Coward · 2016-09-08 08:08 · Score: 0
  
  Depends on the workload. From Wikipedia:
  A POWER8 processor is a 12-chiplet design with variants consisting of either 4, 6, 8, 10 or 12 chiplets, in which one chiplet consists of one core, 512 KB of SRAM L2 cache on a 64-byte wide bus (which is twice as wide as on its predecessor[1]), and 8 MB of L3 eDRAM cache per chiplet shareable among all chiplets.[7] Thus, a six-chiplet processor would have 48 MB of L3 eDRAM cache, while a 12-chiplet processor would have a total of 96 MB of L3 eDRAM cache. The chip can also utilize an up to 128 MB of off-chip eDRAM L4 cache using Centaur companion chips. The on-chip memory controllers can handle 1 TB of RAM and 230 GB/s sustained memory bandwidth. The on-board PCI Express controllers can handle 48 GB/s of I/O to other parts of the system. The cores are designed to operate at clock rates between 2.5 and 5 GHz.[16]
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POWER8
6. Re:Price? by unixisc · 2016-09-08 11:32 · Score: 1
  
  Is AIX still there? Or has it been EOLed?
7. Re:Price? by Anonymous Coward · 2016-09-08 14:07 · Score: 0
  
  I can guarantee this is pretty much it.
8. Re:Price? by Gravis+Zero · 2016-09-08 15:46 · Score: 2
  
  So that's great that data can flow 5x what an x86 server can do. Does it cost 10x as much? Because if it does, you're likely better off with x86.
  unless space and power consumption are a factor... like in a datacenter.
  
  --
  Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
9. Re:Price? by vbraga · 2016-09-08 16:32 · Score: 1
  
  Still there.
  
  --
  English is not my first language. Corrections and suggestions are welcome.
10. Re:Price? by Anonymous Coward · 2016-09-08 18:15 · Score: 0
  
  It seems to be about a factor of 2 premium at the moment, at least for the most recent POWER8 hardware I bought. A factor of 2 isn't nothing, but it's way better than what it has been historically. Note that they have very different (read: higher) prices for the machines that run AIX and Linux vs. the Linux-targeted machines.
What? by IMightB · 2016-09-08 06:33 · Score: 1

What is New Linux?
1. Re:What? by JoeDuncan · 2016-09-08 07:35 · Score: 1
  
  Some kind of IBM branded distro? Like we need a new linux distro though, ugh. Couldn't they just pick one off the shelf?
2. Re:What? by Anonymous Coward · 2016-09-08 07:37 · Score: 0
  
  The unnecessary but continuing troubles with "title case" - it is a conspiracy by publishers to make you read the title at least twice.
  This might make more sense:
  
  IBM launches new Linux, Power8, OpenPower systems
3. Re:What? by Anonymous Coward · 2016-09-08 07:51 · Score: 0
  
  They are just new power servers, that can run linux.
  Several big distros run on Power. Redhat. Suse. Ubuntu.
4. Re:What? by Hognoxious · 2016-09-08 08:37 · Score: 1
  
  If it follows the pattern of New Labour and New Coke, it's Win ME.
  
  --
  Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
5. Re:What? by Anonymous Coward · 2016-09-08 11:54 · Score: 0
  
  Not much more. This would be better:
  "IBM launches new Power8, OpenPower systems for Linux"
Why doesn't IBM respect old employees as much? by shanen · 2016-09-08 09:51 · Score: 1

Whenever I hear about IBM these days, the main thought in my head is "age discrimination". More so when the story is about pumping cash into propping up ancient products with minor improvements. It would be nice if they treated old humans with as much respect as old products, eh?
Details available upon polite request, but it's hard for me to imagine why anyone would be interested in details about IBM these years. Something about cognitive solutions in the cloud? Or has the buzz-phrase changed again?

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Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
What's wrong with SPARC? by shanen · 2016-09-08 10:01 · Score: 1

Yes, what's wrong with Sparc?
Oracle.
However the bigger problem, the veritable elephant in the room, is the increasing dominance of evil companies. When was the last time you got to choose the best company (or politician) instead of the least bad option? The rules of the game are written for bribes, and the biggest bribers are NOT the nicest guys in the room.
Rather the people bribing the politicians to write their favorite rules have massive and incurable problems. There is NO amount of money that would satisfy them. Their companies and their corporate profits could NEVER be YUUGE enough to cure their incurable problem of insatiable greed.
Such greed is EVIL. Welcome to modern capitalism, where the ONLY "virtue" is shareholder value measured in dollars.

--
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Specialized chips are fun, but not enough money by Anonymous Coward · 2016-09-08 12:22 · Score: 0

It's not worth maintaining all the extra software. If you want a specialized chip you should build a REAL specialized chip, not half ass it like this.