IBM introduced its latest generation Power servers built with its own POWER8 processor and NVIDIA’s GPU.
The servers, which are optimized for the most demanding Big Data workloads, leverage the OpenPOWER stack for runing data-intensive tasks on the POWER8 processor while offloading other compute-intensive Big Data workloads to the NVIDIA GPU accelerators. The GPU is capable of running millions of data computations in parallel.
IBM will be tuning a number of its enterprise applications for this model, including the IBM DB2 database software with BLU Acceleration. Additionally, IBM is working to optimize Power versions of widely used GPU-accelerated applications for bioinformatics, defense, finance, molecular dynamics, weather modeling – including SOAP3, NAMD, GROMACS, FFTW library, and Quantum Espresso.
