By Jeff Scheel As you likely have heard, Arvind Krishna, IBM General Manager for Development and Manufacturing in the IBM Systems & Technology Group, announced that Power Systems would be supporting KVM.  This is an exciting announcement for numerous reasons that I'll defer for another posting.  For this blog entry, I thought I'd do some question/answer session based on common questions I've been asked in the past couple weeks.  However, before I do so, I need to remind you that these are our current thoughts at... [More]

Tags:  powerlinux linux kvm jscheel power

by Jeff Scheel, IBM Linux on Power Chief Engineer p { margin-bottom: 0.08in; }a:link { } p { margin-bottom: 0.08in; }a:link { } In June of last year, I started publicly discussing the role that little endian (LE) plays in our Linux on Power strategy with the blog, J ust the FAQs about Little Endian . Then, in August I attempted to eliminate uncertainty in my Removing the FUD and Demystifying LE (little endian) article. With the announcement of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 beta delivering an LE version, it is time to revisit little... [More]

Tags:  powerlinux power linux le applications jscheel

P { margin-bottom: 0.08in; } by Jeff Scheel, IBM Linux on Power Chief Engineer P { margin-bottom: 0.08in; } Never before in my almost 25 year history with IBM have I anticipated a launch like that of our latest POWER8 systems. This launch releases the next generation of POWER processors in 1- and 2-socket scale-out servers with a focus on delivering new Linux solutions, especially in the area of open source clouds built on KVM – a dream come true for this “Chief Engineer.” For me, the most important announcement is the... [More]

Tags:  kvm powerlinux jscheel power power8 powerkvm linux

By: Bill Buros.  Within the Linux open-source community, and across the Power systems, there are a number of new, emerging, and in some cases maturing technologies actively being worked on, prototyped, and prepared for enterprise-class deployment.   Members of the IBM Linux Technology Center around the world are involved with these projects, collaborating with peers across the open-source community.   Over the coming weeks and rolling into next year, here on the PowerLinux Technical Community we plan to begin highlighting these technologies in... [More]

Tags:  deepdive linux power powerlinux

OpenStack Ironic project provides bare metal management functionality. Ironic leverages common bare metal provisioning technologies such as PXE boot and IPMI to cover a wide range of hardware. It also supports plugin architecture for vendor-specific functionality. OpenStack Ironic makes it possible to create baremetal cloud. In this article let us see how one can use OpenStack Ironic to create a baremetal cloud consisting of scale-out Power servers. The overall process is not very different than setting up baremetal cloud consisting of Intel... [More]

Tags:  scale-out ironic power8 power

by Jeff Scheel, IBM Linux on Power Chief Engineer P { margin-bottom: 0.08in; }A:link { } If you were like me and enjoyed the July 4th holiday week, you likely missed a very subtle – yet significant – event: the July 2nd release of firmware by IBM for use in the OpenPOWER Ecosystem under the Apache license, version 2.0 . This action further signifies IBM's commitment to opening up the Power architecture and fulfills an IBM's promise to the OpenPOWER Foundation . It also demonstrates cross-company innovation with the... [More]

Tags:  openpower firmware linux power ppc64le powerlinux jscheel

By: Jeff Scheel.  Ever wondered what IBM means when they say "Power Linux"?  I get questions all the time like, "How does Power Linux differ from RHEL or SLES?"  So, I thought perhaps it might be time to address this in writing, in a common place.   Here's the simple answer: Power Linux generally refers to all supported Linux distributions that run on IBM Power Systems servers.  This means that Power Linux includes all Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) versions.  We simply say... [More]

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I am pleased to announce that several major deep learning frameworks are now available on the Power platform, as "distros" (distributions) that are easily installable using the Ubuntu system installer. Deep learning, or the use of multi-layer neural networks, has revolutionized speech recognition, natural language processing, and computer vision, and continues to to revolutionize IT due to availability of rich data sets, new methods for accelerating neural network training and extremely fast hardware with GPU accelerators. Deep... [More]

Tags:  torch theano power deeplearning power8 caffe openpower #cognitive cuda openblas mldl #aot tensorflow powermldl #mldl blas #power

By: Jeff Scheel, PowerLinux Chief Engineer A software provider recently said, point blank, at the beginning of our discussion, “Convince me that PowerLinux is not a new platform.” The core of my answer went like this: the value of Linux is the same for software providers as it is for customers – Linux provides a single operating system environment across different hardware platforms. Customers and partners who have both x86 Linux skills and Power System skills have all the knowledge they need to run Linux on IBM Power Systems... [More]

Tags:  powerlinux power jscheel linux

By: Jeff Scheel. What an exciting week in Miami, FL!!!  I spent last week at Power Technical University, helping people Think Power Linux.  We had lots of great discussions.  A big "thank you" goes out to all who attended sessions, a bigger "THANK YOU" to those who asked questions and participated in the discussion.   Here are some my key thoughts from the event: The interest in Linux continues to increase.  Although I don't keep formal counts, attendance at the Linux sessions is up over last year which was better than the... [More]

Tags:  powerlinux linux power jscheel

By: Fabio Dassan dos Santos   The IBM Installation Toolkit for PowerLinux goes beyond just trying to speed-up your typical Linux installation, by also delivering an interesting set of tools around system update and recovery.   One of the new and noteworthy features for this 5.3 release, the LPAR Cloning and Restoration tool ,  focuses on extending value in this category by providing a quick and easy way of creating re-usable system images across LPARs.   Through very few steps, it is possible to achieve the following with this new tool:   Save... [More]

Tags:  powerlinux clone restore ibm_installation_toolkit power install linux tooling

By: Jeff Scheel. Two weeks ago, I blogged about my thoughts after attending Power Technical University in Miami.  This week, I bring you my thoughts from our event in Copenhagen, Denmark.   It never ceases to amaze me what I learn at these events.  While the topics I presented were identical to the session in Miami two weeks ago, I still learned a bundle from the Power Linux customers who attended in Copenhagen.   Here are my thoughts from this week: Again, I took a significant number of business cards to Copenhagen and still ran out before the... [More]

Tags:  power linux powerlinux jscheel

By: Jeff Scheel. As I've often mentioned in my blogs, I like to answer questions which I've been very asked frequently. Today's topic provides more details about our marketing slogan "Industry standard, Tuned to the task". We've worked so hard to eliminate the myth that PowerLinux is different (see my blog What does IBM mean when it says, "PowerLinux?" ) that we're now getting questions like: Will my (x86) Linux application just run on PowerLinux? Can I use the same DVDs to install my PowerLinux or Power System server as... [More]

Tags:  linux jscheel power powerlinux

By: Brent Baude.   On May 11th, Fedora announced a beta for F17 for ppc64.  This is another milestone in the march towards Fedora 17 for the powerpc architecture.   The beta announcement itself can be found here ->  http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_17_Beta_PPC_Announcement   Yeah, lots of packages have been updated and so forth but there are two interesting pieces I'd like to draw some attention towards.  Firstly, adoption of grub2 continues in the beta.  We smoothed out some of the rough edges since the alpha timeframe and have a number... [More]

Tags:  linux powerlinux power ranger fedora