Power8 with NVLink Coming to the Nimbix Cloud

Starting later this month, HPC professionals and data scientists wishing to try out NVLink’d Nvidia Pascal P100 GPUs won’t have to spend upwards of $100,000 on NVIDIA’s DGX-1 server or fork over about half that for IBM’s Power8 server with NVLink and four Pascal GPUs. Soon they’ll be able to get the power of Pascal in a public cloud.

On Wednesday (Oct. 5), the Dallas, Texas-based cloud provider Nimbix revealed that it was adding IBM Power S822LC for HPC systems (codenamed “Minsky”) to its heterogeneous HPC cloud platform. Target markets include high-performance computing, data analytics, in-memory databases, and machine learning.

“We are definitely the first public cloud to deploy the Minsky technology and one of the first to deploy Power8 in a high performance high-scalability setting,” said Leo Reiter, CTO and vice president of software engineering at Nimbix. “Obviously what was really interesting on Minksky in addition to Power8 was the Pascal GPUs and we’ve integrated that with our JARVICE platform so it’s a seamless experience for both end users and developers.”

Unveiled by IBM last month, the new Power8 with NVLink processor features 10 cores running up to 3.26 GHz. The processors have higher memory bandwidth than x86 CPUs at 115 GB/s and can have as much as half a terabyte of system memory per socket. There are larger caches per core inside the Power8 processor, and this coupled with the faster cores and memory bandwidth leads to higher application performance and throughput.

To read the rest of the article, go to www.hpcwire.com/2016/10/06/power8-nvlink-coming-nimbix-cloud.