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 companies that
most consumers would think of pci express gen 4 yeah 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 9
processors in our demo rig here are the same ones in everything from high
performance network storage appliances to literal super computers 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 openpower
foundation comes in so now instead of only being able to get a power9 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 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 power9 instead of x86 is every bit as normal like
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 some pci express slots i mean
they're gen 4 that's cool but like yeah us usb header it's just a normal
freaking thing like can i just like run video games on this thing hyperx 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 rail
gun again oh oh balls there you 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 openpower has
some key advantages from a performance standpoint it's allowed faster ecosystem
development so they're already shipping not just pci express gen4 which is about
twice as fast as the third gen bus that everyone else is using right now but
they also have support for opencapi which is twice as fast as PCIe gen4
and the ability to run up to three tesla
v100 gpus off of a single CPU
using envylink which is not only faster
again than opencapi but it also allows for full data coherency between the cpus
and the up to six 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 spectre 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
power9 processors are available in a wide variety of configurations with
anywhere from as few as four to as many as 22 processing cores 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 nine can
handle four 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 diying 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 ac 922 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's 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 figured wow if that were to happen today that would
be like a multi-trillion dollar event like
civilization 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 freaking cool and important right
i mean i guess that's kind of the theme overall of the show here and all that's
left now is to thank ibm for sponsoring this and thank you guys for watching our
video from here down at ibm think 2019.
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finest this is a dead one right