WEBVTT

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so ibm sponsored us down to ibm think 2019 and i'm here walking around in this

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veritable sea of next generation technology like they've got everything

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here from cloud computing to ai to

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quantum computing both from ibm and its partners and then i spot this out of the

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corner of my eye now this might not look unusual at all we've

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got what like a motherboard and like a workstation or

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something but what you're looking at here contains

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tech that at this time is simply not available from the CPU companies that

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most consumers would think of pci express gen 4 yeah right here so these

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systems are running cpus based on ibm's

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power 9 architecture and what's really

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cool is that the hardware for them basically all of it even

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even this motherboard is open source

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what on earth does that mean let me let me explain that

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so ibm's power architecture is nothing new in fact if you bought a mac back in

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the early 2000s you've used it before

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but over the last 10 to 15 years it's gotten some big upgrades and the power 9

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processors in our demo rig here are the same ones in everything from high

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performance network storage appliances to literal super computers but what

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makes them open source well the cpus themselves are not

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although ibm actually does allow even CPU hardware technology to be licensed

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but it's the ecosystem around them that is that's where the open openpower

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foundation comes in so now instead of only being able to get a power9 solution

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from ibm directly you can get one from half a dozen or so different

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manufacturers and what we're looking at here are examples of ones that are open

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in every way so this motherboard i could

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just assuming that i had the means i could just download the schematics and

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build one myself it's crazy even down to the firmware so it's got these two BIOS

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chips with actually this really cool solution so you can actually flip this

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little dip switch and write protect them so that they can't become corrupted or

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infected in any way and i i could just i could build the

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whole thing and it would be ready to rock and then i could just run standard

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software on it like Linux or freebsd

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so this system right here is running regular old Linux and other

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than the fact that it's power9 instead of x86 is every bit as normal like

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workstation or tower server as you could expect so you got a couple CPU sockets

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for up to a total of 44 cores you got 16

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memory slots they run quad channel memory i mean the thing that's

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exceptional about it is how sort of unexceptional it is it just looks like a

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normal motherboard you've even got just like a standard Radeon pro workstation

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graphics card in here x5 sound card of all things some pci express slots i mean

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they're gen 4 that's cool but like yeah us usb header it's just a normal

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freaking thing like can i just like run video games on this thing hyperx gaming

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keyboard and mouse on here nice i like it keeping it classy right enterprise

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show this is what like a quake arena style oh

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my god this mouse is so sensitive is this a shotgun oh god this is the rail

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gun again oh oh balls there you go you're done this is like the least

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appropriate possible use of a system

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like this i love it team using development

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workstation for gaming that's my team one more one more

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oh no i finally i died

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okay so that's probably enough of me playing games on the very serious tool

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actually let's talk about why all of this so the openness of openpower has

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some key advantages from a performance standpoint it's allowed faster ecosystem

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development so they're already shipping not just pci express gen4 which is about

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twice as fast as the third gen bus that everyone else is using right now but

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they also have support for opencapi which is twice as fast as PCIe gen4

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and the ability to run up to three tesla

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v100 gpus off of a single CPU

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using envylink which is not only faster

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again than opencapi but it also allows for full data coherency between the cpus

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and the up to six gpus that you can handle in a dual CPU system so that

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means that they don't have to wait around to share information between them

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speeding up computationally intensive workloads like in particular ai then

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there's the security side of things with spectre and meltdown to some extent but

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more with some of the recent concerns about the management engine on some

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processors there's a huge part of the open source community or just the

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computing community in general that wants more openness when it comes to

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hardware a high performance chip that has no binary blobs on it and you can

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build everything from source and that is exactly what we're looking at here so

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power9 processors are available in a wide variety of configurations with

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anywhere from as few as four to as many as 22 processing cores but there are a

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few things that they all have in common quad channel ddr4

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44 pci express gen 4 lanes per CPU and a

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ton of optimization for massively parallel workloads so you might be

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familiar with technologies that use smt to allow a single CPU core to work on

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more than one thread at a time well rather than two threads power nine can

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handle four threads per CPU so a fully loaded 44 core rig like this one can

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handle 176 threads now then obviously most

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people aren't just running out and

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buying one of these and one of these and diying a tower for the receptionist in

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their office with it or whatever so the question that this raises then is

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why have a low cost board like this or even relatively speaking a low cost

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board like this one well systems like this are mostly geared

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towards developers so that they have an affordable way to test their code at

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their desk with that said though that's not necessarily because it has to be that

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way forever with the right software

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either of these could be adapted for more conventional you know consumer or

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professional use it's just that that's not the focus right now so they're

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mainly there for the developers who are writing code for the bigger systems like

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ibm's ac 922 this crazy powerful ai

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optimized server platform that's been used in the lawrence livermore and oak

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ridge national Labs which by the way contain the number two and number one

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respectively most powerful supercomputers in the world right now

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here's another one this is something ibm's calling power ai vision and this

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is like a new program without a ton of adoption yet but there's some amazing

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real world applications so they did some stuff with frontier development Labs

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that involved space weather specifically tracking solar flares recognizing that a

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hundred years ago there was one that fried all of the basic electronics on

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earth at the time and they figured wow if that were to happen today that would

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be like a multi-trillion dollar event like

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civilization as we know it threatening so they're trying to use deep learning

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and machine learning to put together historical and predictive data so that

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we could prepare for that pretty freaking cool and important right

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i mean i guess that's kind of the theme overall of the show here and all that's

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left now is to thank ibm for sponsoring this and thank you guys for watching our

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video from here down at ibm think 2019.

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if you guys disliked this video well you know where that button is but if you liked it hit like get subscribed or

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maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured

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only if you have very deep pockets like down to your shins

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at the link in the video description and uh while you're down there there's our

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merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which

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is definitely worth a join

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finest this is a dead one right