IBM, IIT Bombay open high power computing facility on campus

Mumbai, Aug 18 (PTI) Tech major IBM and IIT Bombay todayannounced the opening of the first OpenPOWER Research Facility(OPRF) at the institute to help drive further education,innovation and research with the country’s National KnowledgeNetwork. The network aims to interconnect all institutions ofhigher learning and research with a high-speed datacommunication network, facilitating knowledge sharing andcollaborative research and innovation. Open POWER Foundation was born out of a collaboration byIBM, NVIDIA and Mellanox, and supports open development on thePOWER architecture. OPRF has been established to provide the country’s largeresearch and development community with technical assistanceand infrastructure to further indigenous research. "Open collaboration is driving the next wave of innovationacross the entire system stack, allowing clients andorganizations to develop customized solutions to capitalize ontodayÂ’s emerging workloads," Monica Aggarwal, Vice President,India Systems Development Lab (ISDL), IBM Systems told PTI. "The OPRF will enable Indian companies, universities andgovernment organizations to build technologies indigenouslyusing the high-performance POWER processor, helping to drivethe national IT agenda of India," she added. The OpenPOWER Foundation is a global, open developmentmembership organization formed to facilitate and inspirecollaborative innovation on the POWER architecture. So far, it has 230 members across 24 countries, and islooking at aggressively expanding its network in top tierinstitutions in the country, Aggarwal said. OpenPOWER members share expertise, investment and server-class intellectual property to develop solutions that servethe evolving needs of technology customers. With the opening of OPRF, scientists, students, developersand enterprises who are a part of the National KnowledgeNetwork initiative can tap into the latest and best availableOpenPOWER-based infrastructure, IBM said here. To begin with, PhD scholars, MTech and engineeringstudents will tap into OPRF to develop new age applicationsand solutions around eGovernance, healthcare, education,agriculture and high-performance computing. "OPRF at IIT Bombay supports an open technology ecosystemfor high-performance computing and its applications. OPRF gives opportunities to students, faculty, andresearchers to gain familiarity with OpenPOWER systemfeatures, and make contributions to the OpenPOWER foundationin terms of power processor, GPU acceleration, networkadapters/switches and application codes," PSV Nataraj,Professor and Principal Investigator, IIT Bombay said. In terms of its objectives and activities, OPRF alignswell with the recently-launched National SupercomputingMission of Government of India, he added. PTI DSK DKABKRDS