CERN Computing Seminar

Towards Open Source Hardware: IBM Power ISA & Interconnect

by Dr Carl Anderson (IBM)

Europe/Zurich
40/S2-B01 - Salle Bohr (CERN)

40/S2-B01 - Salle Bohr

CERN

100
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Description

On August 20, 2019 IBM announced that the Power ISA would become open source. Open source hardware is now a growing ecosystem. Facebook founded the Open Compute Project in 2011. This has been followed by RISCV, Chip Alliance, DARPA’s POSH and IDEA programs and others. IBM, a strong supporter of open source, will make the Power ISA open with an Apache V2 license. The Open Power Consortium will become part of the Open Linux Foundation. The Power ISA will now use the Open Linux Foundation governance. The Power MicroWatt softcore VHDL was made open source and uploaded to GitHub. IBM will open source the Open Memory Interface, OMI and Open CAPI, Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface. The business, legal, technical, software and future aspects of making the Power ISA open source will be discussed.

About the speaker

Carl J. Anderson received his BS in physics from the University of Missouri in 1974 and his Ph.D. in Physics from the University Wisconsin in 1979. He joined IBM Research in 1979 where he worked on circuit design, package design, Josephson Superconducting, Gallium Arsenide Optoelectronics design and fabrication, became Senior Silicon circuit design manager & chief engineer on the early Power microprocessor. Carl became an IBM Fellow in 2000 and was responsible for all aspects of circuit design, chip integration, packaging, and technology and EDA tool methodology in IBM server division. In 2003 received an honorary Doctor of Science from the University of Wisconsin for his contributions to microprocessor design. In the last 12 years Carl has worked on data center design, HPC and cloud computing. He was responsible for raisng the understanding of the economics of Green data centers for HPC and cloud computing. Carl was the IBM lead for server and data center workshops with large internet companies. He was one of the first to model the costs of internet cloud providers. He has implemented engineering and HPC clouds in IBM and for IBM customers. He has worked on the use of HPC clouds for analytics on very large data bases. Currently, Carl is working on Open Power and future IBM server products.

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