OCF Joins the OpenPOWER Foundation 

OCF, the HPC, big data management and analytics provider, has joined the OpenPOWER Foundation, an open development community based on the POWER microprocessor architecture, as a silver member.

The OpenPOWER foundation is an open, not-for-profit technical community created to enable today’s data centres to rethink their approach to technology.  The aim of the foundation is to create a collaborative ecosystem for members to share expertise, investment, and server-class intellectual property to serve the evolving needs of customers and industry.

OCF joins a growing list of technology organisations working to build and develop advanced server, networking, storage and acceleration technology, as well as industry leading open source software. Aimed at delivering more choice, control and flexibility to developers of next-generation, hyperscale and cloud data centres, the group makes POWER hardware and software available to open development for the first time. The foundation also makes POWER intellectual property licensable to others, greatly expanding the ecosystem of innovators on the platform.

“We are not only excited about the technology but also the momentum the community is gathering from its members including Google, IBM, Mellanox, the Science & Technology Facilities Council (STFC) and Universities from across the world, who are working collaboratively to drive innovation in this technology,” says Andrew Dean, OCF business development manager.

“OCF are proud to be associated with the OpenPOWER Foundation,” adds OCF managing director Julian Fielden. “As members of the foundation it will improve OCF’s understanding of what is being achieved within the OpenPOWER community and will enable both OCF and its customers to take advantage of the technology. Using our extensive experience of the UK Research and High Performance sector, it will also give us the opportunity to feed our knowledge and skills back into the community.”

“The development model of the OpenPOWER Foundation is one that elicits collaboration and represents a new way in exploiting and innovating around processor technology,” says Brad McCredie, OpenPOWER President and IBM Fellow.  “With the POWER architecture designed for Big Data and Cloud, new OpenPOWER Foundation members like OCF will be able to add their own innovations on top of the technology to create new applications that capitalise on emerging workloads.”