Gadgetory

so IBM sponsored us down to IBM think 2019 and I'm here walking around in this veritable sea of next-generation technology like they've got everything here from cloud computing to AI to quantum computing both from IBM and its partners and then I spot this out of the corner of my eye now this might not look unusual at all we've got what like a motherboard and like a workstation or something but what you're looking at here contains tech that at this time is simply not available from the CPU company is that most consumers would think of PCI Express Gen 4 right here so these systems are running CPUs based on IBM's power 9 architecture and what's really cool is that the hardware for them basically all of it even even this motherboard is open source what on earth does that mean let me let me explain that so IBM's power architecture is nothing new in fact if you bought a Mac back in the early 2000s you've used it before but over the last 10 to 15 years it's gotten some big upgrades and the power nine processors in our demo rig here are the same ones in everything from high-performance Network storage appliances to literal supercomputers but what makes them open-source well the CPUs themselves are not although IBM actually does allow even CPU hardware technology to be licensed but it's the ecosystem around them that is that's where the open power foundation comes in so now instead of only being able to get a power 9 solution from IBM directly you can get one from half a dozen or so different manufacturers and what we're looking at here are examples of ones that are open in every way so this motherboard I could just assuming that I had the means I could just download the schematics and build one myself it's crazy even down to the firmware so it's got these two BIOS chips with actually this really cool solution so you can actually flip this little dip switch and write protect them so that they can't become corrupted or infected in any way and I could just I could build the whole thing and it would be ready to rock and then I could just run standard software on it like Linux or FreeBSD so this system right here is running regular old Linux and other than the fact that it's power 9 instead of x86 is every bit as normal alike workstation or tower server as you could expect so you got a couple CPU sockets for up to a total of 44 cores you got 16 memory slots they run quad-channel memory I mean the thing that's exceptional about it is how sort of unexceptional it is it just looks like a normal motherboard you've even got just like a standard Radeon Pro workstation graphics card in here x5 sound card of all things and PCI Express slots I mean their Gen 4 that's cool but like yeah us USB header normal friggin thing like could I just like run video games on this thing hi prince gaming keyboard and mouse on here nice I like it keeping it classy right enterprise show this is what like a quake arena style oh my god this mouse is so sensitive is this a shotgun oh god this is the railgun again Oh Oh balls there ya go you're done this is like the least appropriate possible use of a system like this I love it team using development workstation for gaming that's my team one more one more oh no I finally I died okay so that's probably enough of me playing games on the very serious tool actually let's talk about why all of this so the openness of open power has some key advantages from a performance standpoint it's allowed faster ecosystem development so they're already shipping not just PCI Express Gen 4 which is about twice as fast as the 3rd gen bus that everyone else is using right now but they also have support for open copy which is twice as fast as PCIe Gen 4 and the ability to run up to 3 Tesla V 100 GPUs off of a single CPU using env link which is not only faster again than open copy but it also allows for full data coherency between the CPUs and the up to 6 GPUs that you can handle in a dual CPU system so that means that they don't have to wait around to share information between them speeding up computationally intensive workloads like in particular AI then there's the security side of things with specter and meltdown to some extent but more with some of the recent concerns about the management engine on some processors there's a huge part of the open source community or just the computing community in general that wants more openness when it comes to hardware a high-performance chip that has no binary blobs on it and you can build everything from source and that is exactly what we're looking at here so power 9 processors are available in a wide variety of configurations with anywhere from as few as four to as many as to processing course but there are a few things that they all have in common quad-channel ddr4 44 PCI Express Gen 4 lanes per CPU and a ton of optimization for massively parallel workloads so you might be familiar with technologies that use SMT to allow a single CPU core to work on more than one thread at a time well rather than two threads power 9 can handle 4 threads per CPU so a fully loaded 44 core rig like this one can handle 176 threads now then obviously most people aren't just running out and buying one of these and one of these and DIY a tower for the receptionist in their office with it or whatever so the question that this raises then is why have a low cost board like this or even relatively speaking a low cost board like this one well systems like this are mostly geared towards developers so that they have an affordable way to test their code at their desk with that said though that's not necessarily because it has to be that way forever with the right software either of these could be adapted for more conventional you know consumer or professional use it's just that that's not the focus right now so they're mainly there for the developers who are writing code for the bigger systems like IBM's a c920 to this crazy powerful AI optimized server platform that's been used in the Lawrence Livermore and Oak Ridge National Labs which by the way contain the number two and number one respectively most powerful supercomputers in the world right now here's another one this is something IBM is calling power AI vision and this is like a new program without a ton of adoption yet but there's some amazing real-world applications so they did some stuff with frontier development labs that involved space weather specifically tracking solar flares recognizing that a hundred years ago there was one that fried all of the basic electronics on earth at the time and they figure wow if that were to happen today that would be like a multi trillion dollar event civil Asian as we know it threatening so they're trying to use deep learning and machine learning to put together historical and predictive data so that we could prepare for that pretty freakin cool and important right I mean I guess that's kind of the theme overall the show here and all that's left now is to thank IBM for 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