I’ve just returned from International Supercomputing 2014, which took place in Leipzig, Germany. As was the case in 2013, I greatly enjoyed my time at the conference, and the hospitality in Leipzig. It’s a wonderful city to visit.

You will have read in my previous blogs about my experiences with ARM based developer systems, and running IBM Platform LSF. For me, ISC 2014 was a very interesting event for one big reason - variety! Variety is the spice of life as they say. And the variety in this case came from the displays at OpenPOWER Foundation members Mellanox and NVIDIA, as well as servers based on the the newly unveiled Applied Micro X-Gene 64-bit ARM processors.

Although small in size, the Tyan POWER8 motherboard with NVIDIA Tesla K40 installed made a strong statement. Although OpenPOWER was founded in 2013, we are already seeing the benefits of this foundation - with a varied member base including education, interconnect, and accelerator vendors - all with an HPC pedigree. With the rich set of members that is growing, these look to be exciting times for the IBM POWER8 processor and the OpenPower Foundation.

For those of you who did not attend, the IBM booth had a number of live demos including the IBM Platform Computing Cloud Service, which is built on top of IBM SoftLayer infrastructure. This service can provide both hybrid and stand-alone clouds and is ideally suited for HPC workloads - as it’s non-virtualized.

So we say Auf Wiedersehen to Leipzig for now and look forward to the spice that New Orleans will provide this autumn; where there will surely be more exciting things emerging from the OpenPower Foundation!