It’s been ages since I’ve posted to this blog. I’ve not forgotten about it - I’ve been figuratively stirring the technical computing goulash pot over on the IBM Systems In the Making blog.

Having recently moved house, all of the old classic and newer Arm based systems that I’ve written about previously are still mostly packed away. My hands have been more focused on home improvement rather than tinkering. As those in HPC circles will know, the annual Supercomputing SC16 event starts this coming Sunday in Salt Lake City, UT. Interestingly, if my memory serves me well the last time we were in Salt Lake City for SC12, I was a newbie with IBM, having joined as a result of the acquisition of Platform Computing.

The HPC landscape has changed quite a bit since then, including the divestiture of the IBM x86 server business to Lenovo and the birth of the OpenPOWER Foundation. The OpenPOWER Foundation has gone from baby steps to sprinting with a huge and diverse group of members from accelerators, interconnects, research organizations and more - all united on a common goal - to drive innovation and change in enterprise computing and HPC via the OpenPOWER platform. It’s like somebody has taken a big wooden spoon and stirred the goulash in the pot - because we all know that if things stand still for too long in the pot, it’s going to burn.

As I’ve banged on about in previous blogs, I’m more pleased than ever to see this explosion of diversity in HPC from A(RM), P(OWER) to X(86). When you throw accelerators such as FPGAs, GPUs into the mix, what is needed more than ever to address this complexity in diverse environments is a software defined approach - which hides this complexity from the users and allows them to leverage the power of todays environments.

IBM Spectrum LSF (formerly Platform LSF) has been making this possible for over 20 years. A glance at the OS and platform support list illustrates the breadth and depth of OS and processor support. Not only does IBM Spectrum LSF make tying together heterogeneous resources easy, it’s proven technology allows organizations to share resources on a global scale. In fact, the latest IBM Spectrum LSF V10 release from June 2016 contained contained numerous enhancements all focused on improving the productivity the users of HPC and controlling costs. Read more in this top 10 cool things about IBM Spectrum LSF blog. And looking beyond HPC, the IBM Spectrum Computing family of products helps provide advanced resource management capabilities for diverse workloads including Hadoop, Spark.

Yours truly will be in Salt Lake City for SC16. Drop by booth 1018 to talk about how IBM software defined computing can help your organization. IBM will be holding a number of user groups and seminars covering the broad spectrum of IBM solutions for HPC. And for IBM Spectrum LSF users, we’ll be holding our annual user group, where you can hear how your peers are using IBM Spectrum LSF to get an advantage, and learn about the latest developments in IBM Spectrum LSF from our experts.

Come on and stir it up! You’ll like it!