Cirrascale® Joins OpenPOWER™ Foundation, Announces GPU-Accelerated POWER8®-Based Multi-Device Development Platform

The Cirrascale RM4950 4U POWER8-based development platform, with Cirrascale SR3514 PCIe switch riser, enables up to four NVIDIA Tesla GPU Accelerators or other compatible PCIe Gen 3.0 devices.

Cirrascale Corporation®, a premier developer of build-to-order, open architecture blade-based and rackmount computing infrastructure, today announced its membership within the OpenPOWER™ Foundation and the release of its RM4950 development platform, based on the IBM® POWER8® 4-core Turismo SCM processor, and designed with NVIDIA® Tesla® GPU accelerators in mind. The new POWER8-based system provides a solution perfectly aligned to support GPU-accelerated big data analytics, deep learning, and scientific high-performance computing (HPC) applications.

“As Cirrascale dives deeper into supporting more robust installations of GPU-accelerated applications, like those used in big data analytics and deep learning, we’re finding customers rapidly adopting disruptive technologies to advance their high-end server installations,” said David Driggers, CEO, Cirrascale Corporation. “The RM4950 POWER8-based server provides a development platform unique to the marketplace that has the ability to support multiple PCIe devices on a single root complex while enabling true scalable performance of GPU-accelerated applications.”

The secret sauce of the RM4950 development platform lies with the company’s 80-lane Gen3 PCIe switch-enabled riser, the Cirrascale SR3514. It has been integrated into several recent product releases to create an extended PCIe fabric supporting up to four NVIDIA Tesla GPU accelerators, or other compatible PCIe devices, on a single PCIe root complex.

“Cirrascale’s new servers enable enterprise and HPC customers to take advantage of GPU acceleration with POWER CPUs,” said Sumit Gupta, general manager of Accelerated Computing at NVIDIA. “The servers support multiple GPUs, which dramatically enhances performance for a range of applications, including data analytics, deep learning and scientific computing.”

The system is the first of its type for Cirrascale as a new member of the OpenPOWER Foundation. The company joins a growing roster of technology organizations working collaboratively to build advanced server, networking, storage and acceleration technologies as well as industry leading open source software aimed at delivering more choice, control and flexibility to developers of next-generation, hyperscale and cloud data centers. The group makes POWER hardware and software available to open development for the first time, as well as making POWER intellectual property licensable to others, greatly expanding the ecosystem of innovators on the platform.

“The Cirrascale RM4950 4U POWER8-based development platform is great example of how new advancements are made possible through open collaboration,” said Ken King, General Manager of OpenPOWER Alliances. “Our OpenPOWER Foundation members are coming together to create meaningful disruptive technologies, providing the marketplace with unique solutions to manage today’s big data needs.”

The Cirrascale RM4950 development platform is the first of the company’s POWER8-based reference systems with plans for production environment systems being announced later this year. The current development platform is immediately available to order and will be shipping in volume in Q2 2015. Licensing opportunities will also be available immediately to both customers and partners.

About Cirrascale Corporation Cirrascale Corporation is a premier provider of custom rackmount and blade server solutions developed and engineered for today’s conventional data centers. Cirrascale leverages its patented Vertical Cooling Technology, engineering resources, and intellectual property to provide the industry’s most energy-efficient standards-based platforms with the lowest possible total cost of ownership in the densest form factor. Cirrascale sells to large-scale infrastructure operators, hosting and managed services providers, cloud service providers, government, higher education, and HPC users. Cirrascale also licenses its award winning technology to partners globally. To learn more about Cirrascale and its unique data center infrastructure solutions, please visit http://www.cirrascale.com or call (888) 942-3800.

Cirrascale and the Cirrascale logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cirrascale Corporation. NVIDIA and Tesla are trademarks or registered trademarks of NVIDIA Corporation in the U.S. and other countries. IBM, POWER8, and OpenPOWER are trademarks or registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation in the U.S. and other countries. All other names or marks are property of their respective owners.