IBM, IIT Bombay open high power computing facility on campus

Tech major IBM and IIT Bombay today announced the opening of the first OpenPOWER Research Facility (OPRF) at the institute to help drive further education, innovation and research with the country's National Knowledge Network.
The network aims to interconnect all institutions of higher learning and research with a high-speed data communication network, facilitating knowledge sharing and collaborative research and innovation.
Open POWER Foundation was born out of a collaboration by IBM, NVIDIA and Mellanox, and supports open development on the POWER architecture.
OPRF has been established to provide the country's large research and development community with technical assistance and infrastructure to further indigenous research.

"Open collaboration is driving the next wave of innovation across the entire system stack, allowing clients and organizations to develop customized solutions to capitalize on today's emerging workloads," Monica Aggarwal, Vice President, India Systems Development Lab (ISDL), IBM Systems told PTI.
"The OPRF will enable Indian companies, universities and government organizations to build technologies indigenously using the high-performance POWER processor, helping to drive the national IT agenda of India," she added.

The OpenPOWER Foundation is a global, open development membership organization formed to facilitate and inspire collaborative innovation on the POWER architecture.
So far, it has 230 members across 24 countries, and is looking at aggressively expanding its network in top tier institutions in the country, Aggarwal said.

OpenPOWER members share expertise, investment and server- class intellectual property to develop solutions that serve the evolving needs of technology customers.
With the opening of OPRF, scientists, students, developers and enterprises who are a part of the National Knowledge Network initiative can tap into the latest and best available OpenPOWER-based infrastructure, IBM said here.
To begin with, PhD scholars, MTech and engineering students will tap into OPRF to develop new age applications and solutions around eGovernance, healthcare, education, agriculture and high-performance computing.
"OPRF at IIT Bombay supports an open technology ecosystem for high-performance computing and its applications.
OPRF gives opportunities to students, faculty, and researchers to gain familiarity with OpenPOWER system features, and make contributions to the OpenPOWER foundation in terms of power processor, GPU acceleration, network adapters/switches and application codes," PSV Nataraj, Professor and Principal Investigator, IIT Bombay said.

In terms of its objectives and activities, OPRF aligns well with the recently-launched National Supercomputing Mission of Government of India, he added.