IBM, Nvidia and Mellanox Technologies have announced plans to open an OpenPower Design Center in France; it will be the second facility of its kind in Europe. The design center will allow hardware and software developers to experiment with IBM’s Power Chip architecture. Dave Turek, an IBM vice president, said, “Our launch of this new Center reinforces IBM’s commitment to open-source collaboration and is a next step in expanding the software and solution ecosystem around OpenPower.”
The same three companies helped launch the OpenPower Foundation in 2013. The foundation is part of IBM’s effort to open up its Power architecture in order to encourage more organizations to buy Power-based servers and build Power-based applications. The organization has been aggressively courting high-performance computing (HPC) business, and IBM also recently launched SuperVessel, an OpenPower-based cloud computing service that developers and researchers can use for free.