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Power Architecture celebrated at European press summit


Press invited to the home of the MareNostrum, one of the world's fastest supercomputers

Today, the day before its first gathering in Europe, Power.org invited the press to the home of the MareNostrum, one of the world's fastest supercomputers, at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center in Barcelona, Spain. In this unusual setting, several announcements were made by Power.org and companies involved in forming Power.org.

New members

Power.org announced 11 new members supporting the group's formation: AboveMicro, Anyka Cayman, Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Celestica, DAFCA, Forte Design Systems, Rapport Incorporated, Teak Technologies, Inc., TimeLab, Universal Scientific Industrial, and Venture Corporation Limited. These companies join existing member companies such as AMCC, Bull, Cadence Design Systems, Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing, Culturecom, IBM, Jabil Circuit, Novell, Red Hat, Sony Corporation, Shanghai Belling, Synopsys, Thales, Tundra Semiconductor, and Wistron.

 Inside the chapel, view from the side (Photo courtesy of Barcelona Supercomputing Center)
Inside the chapel, view from the side (Photo courtesy of Barcelona Supercomputing Center)

New products and developments

Companies involved in forming Power.org unveiled new products and deployments based on Power Architecture technology, while others announced significant industry momentum on Power Architecture-based products already brought to market.

  • Astron announced that with a LINPACK benchmark of 27.4 Teraflops (trillion floating-point operations per second) of sustained performance, the IBM Blue Gene system unveiled by Maria van der Hoeven, Dutch Minister of Education and Science in Groningen (Netherlands), is the fastest supercomputer in Europe. The computer will be the heart of a new type of radio telescope developed by ASTRON, a leading astronomy organization in the Netherlands. The next Top500 List (http://www.top500.org/) of supercomputers is slated to be published in June 2005, but if the list were published today, the IBM Blue Gene installation at Groningen would be the fourth most powerful system on the list, making it the fastest supercomputer in Europe. Read the press release

  • IBM announced that it would make public specifications for the Cell processor and release source code that would enable any hardware or software developer to create products for it in an attempt to drive adoption and new applications. Details of Cell, developed jointly with Sony and Toshiba, have been closely guarded to date. Described as a supercomputer on a chip no bigger than a fingernail, Cell will feature in workstations, Sony's PlayStation3 games console, and products of Sony and Toshiba.

  • IBM and The Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) are today announcing a major joint research initiative — nicknamed the Blue Brain Project — to take brain research to a new level. Read the press release

  • Max Planck Society announced that the company will use a cutting-edge, POWER5™ processor based IBM eServer p5 575 supercomputing system to double its computing power, allowing research and experiments which before were not possible – in the areas of nanotechnology and environmental protection as well as other innovative research projects envisioned by the Society. Read the press release

  • Synopsys announced the availability of fully synthesizable versions of IBM’s PowerPC® 405 and 440 processors as part of the DesignWare® Star IP (intellectual property) program. The IBM PowerPC processors will be distributed as fully soft register transfer level (RTL) cores, which can be easily implemented in any foundry process and configured to product design requirements including low power, high performance, or small silicon area. Read the press release

  • Thales introduced the EasyG5, the world’s first Dual-G5 VME system on the market. The EasyG5 system is built from the Power Architecture technology and designed specifically for use in cutting-edge avionics environments and military embedded applications. Read the press release

  • Xilinx, Inc. announced significant momentum with integrated PowerPC™ cores in Xilinx® Virtex™-II Pro Platform FPGAs. The milestone underscores industry traction and continued success achieved with the Virtex-II Pro PowerPC solution for customers worldwide. Read the press release

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Published June 8, 2005