National OpenPOWER ADG Summit Held in India Last Week
Dec. 21 -- Since the OpenPOWER Foundation has been established, the number of member organizations has increased to over 170, including about 50 academic members who have formed the Academia Discussion Group. This group had it's first summit in India on December 16th in Bangalore. The objectives of the summit were to facilitate networking and to improve the technical knowledge of ADG members on relevant OpenPOWER technologies. It also focused on creating a platform for commercial OpenPOWER members to explore opportunities for collaborating with Indian ADG members.
Summit Overview
The summit demonstrated ADG and commercial OpenPOWER partners' interest in a new open technology ecosystem and their intention to play a visible role. The summit discussions were around OpenPOWER technologies for high-performance computing and scientific data analytics applications. The summit also promoted the exchange of results among the India academia OpenPOWER members to enhance their technical knowledge and facilitate networking. Representatives from IBM, NVIDIA, Mellanox, IIT Bombay, IIT Roorkee, SASTRA University and JSC highlighted their contributions to the OpenPOWER foundation in terms of the power processor, GPU acceleration and network adapters/switches, along with the development and scalability of application areas analytics using SPARK, genomics and translational medicines. Other participants are CDAC, HCL, Locuz, Wipro Sheeltron, NIT Warangal, NIT Surathkal, VIT and Coimbatore Institute of Technology.
Interesting Topics Shared by Experts
- Julich Supercomputing Center: Introduction to Julich and Various HPC /OpenPOWER related activities at the Julich Supercomputing Center
- IIT Bombay: Industry and academia take advantage of OpenPOWER technologies and OpenPOWER research cloud features
- IIT Roorkee: Research activities in the areas of Mobile Cloud, IOT and Security. Also shared future research plans with the OpenPOWER system
- Sastra University: Discussed the HPC system, various applications and platform computing stack in their datacenter.
Major Outcomes
Academia Members got to know each other across India disciplinary/academic boundaries and found there were many common interests. These included fundamental challenges to HPC (parallelization, latency, bandwidth, job throughput), practical issues such as time to solution, use of community- and commercially-supported software.
The summit helped demonstrate many overlapping interests among participants and led towards the first step on collaborative work. Many of the findings are applicable to a broad range of scientific domains.
Next Steps
- ADG aims for a 2 day Summit as per requests from various participants
- Conduct OpenPOWER Hackathon and Hands on Summit in various cities in India
- Sharing applications results on OpenPOWER systems through the Academia Discussion Group.
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Source: IBM
