The Linux Foundation announces new open hardware technologies and collaboration

The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced that the OpenPOWER Foundation will become a project hosted at The Linux Foundation. The project includes IBM’s open POWER Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) and contributed Source Design Implementations required to support data-driven hardware for intensive workloads like Artificial Intelligence (AI).

OpenPOWER is the open steward for the Power Architecture and has the support of 350 members, including IBM, Google, Inspur Power Systems, Yadro, Hitachi, Wistron, Mellanox, NVIDIA, and Red Hat.

The governance model within the Linux Foundation gives software developers assurance of compatibility while developing AI and hybrid cloud native applications that take advantage of POWER’s rich feature set and open compute hardware and software ecosystems.

As the demand rises for more and more compute-intensive workloads like AI and in-memory analytics, commodity systems vendors have struggled with the looming predictions of the end of Moore’s Law. Central processing units (CPUs) may no longer handle the rising demands alone, and data-centric systems are built to maximize the flow of data between CPUs and attached devices for specialized workloads. By hosting OpenPOWER at The Linux Foundation, a cross-project, cross-community collaboration, it will accelerate development of hardware and software to support data-centric systems, by making it available to a growing global audience.

“The OpenPOWER community has been doing critical work to support the increasing demands of enterprises that are using big data for AI and machine learning workloads. The move to bring these efforts together with the worldwide ecosystem of open source developers across projects at The Linux Foundation will unleash a new level of innovation by giving developers everywhere more access to the tools and technologies that will define the next generation of POWER architecture,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director at The Linux Foundation.

“IBM believes that open collaboration through groups like Linux Foundation is key to delivering value for our clients,” said IBM’s OpenPOWER General Manager Ken King. “With our recent Red Hat acquisition and today’s announcement, IBM becomes the only commercially-available processor vendor and POWER becomes the only architecture that can boast of a completely open system stack, from the foundation of the hardware through the software stack.”

“The OpenPOWER Foundation was created in 2013 to promote open standards and specifications of systems designed around the IBM POWER architecture,” said Hugh Blemings, Executive Director, OpenPOWER Foundation. “Since then, hundreds of companies from around the world have contributed to the framework and collaborated with each other to build technology for the benefit of their customers. Collaborating with The Linux Foundation marks the next step in opening up the community further.”

To find more information on the OpenPOWER Foundation or get involved in the project, please visit: The Linux Foundation Blog, IBM Blog, OpenPOWER blog.