IBM in data centre pact with Google, Mellanox, Nvidia, Tyan

IBM is teaming up with search giant Google, and technology firms Mellanox, Nvidia and Tyan to form the OpenPower Consortium – an open development alliance based on IBM's Power microprocessor architecture, to toimprove data centre technology.

Financial terms of the deal have not been announced.

Israel's Mellanox is a leading supplier of end-to-end InfiniBand and Ethernet interconnect solutions and services for servers and storage. While Nvidia, maker of the GPU processor for PC graphics, is a pioneer in visual computing, Tyan is a Taiwanese x86 server maker.

The alliance is being interpreted as IBM's attempt to outflank semiconductor giant Intel and ARM, and boost its own stagnant micrprpocessor sales.

"The Consortium intends to build advanced server, networking, storage and GPU-acceleration technology aimed at delivering more choice, control and flexibility to developers of next-generation, hyperscale and cloud data centers," IBM said in a statement.

The move makes IBM's Power "hardware and software available to open development for the first time as well as making Power IP licensable to others, greatly expanding the ecosystem of innovators on the platform".

The consortium will offer open-source Power firmware, the software that controls basic chip functions. By doing this, IBM and the consortium can offer unprecedented customisation in creating new styles of server hardware for a variety of computing workloads.

''The founding members of the OpenPower Consortium represent the next generation in data-center innovation,'' said Steve Mills, senior vice president, and group executive, IBM Software & Systems. ''Combining our talents and assets around the Power architecture can greatly increase the rate of innovation throughout the industry. Developers now have access to an expanded and open set of server technologies for the first time. This type of 'collaborative development' model will change the way data center hardware is designed and deployed.''

''We are happy taking part in the OpenPower Consortium and its mission to further accelerate the rate of innovation, performance and efficiency for advanced data center solutions,'' said Gilad Shainer, vice president of marketing at Mellanox Technologies. ''Open source and community development are key to enabling innovative computer platforms and better serve the scalable and emerging applications in the areas of high-performance, Web 2.0 and cloud computing. Mellanox's mission is to provide the most efficient interconnect solution for all compute and CPU architectures and deliver the highest return-on-investment to our users.''

As part of their initial collaboration within the consortium, NVIDIA and IBM will work together to integrate the CUDA GPU and POWER ecosystems.

''The OpenPower Consortium brings together an ecosystem of hardware, system software, and enterprise applications that will provide powerful computing systems based on Nvidia GPUs and Power CPUs,'' said Sumit Gupta, general manager of the Tesla Accelerated Computing Business at NVIDIA.

"OpenPower will bring a new wave of innovation to next-generation data centers," said Albert Mu, general manager of Tyan Computer and vice president of MiTAC International Corp. "A strong ecosystem built around OpenPower will bring a range of new technology choices to market, offering more capabilities for Tyan's customers."

OpenPower is open to any firm that wants to innovate on the Power platform and participate in an open, collaborative effort.