Raptor Computing Reveals More Details About Their Blackbird Low-Cost POWER9 Board

[coder]

How practical would a Power 9 based PC be as your regular desktop? Is there full Linux OS support with Ubuntu, Fedora or something else? Is there a GNU compiler port ... Will I be able to do the basics of emails, write documents and surf the web.

Yes.

As long as you don't need to run x86/x86-64 binaries on it, it should be fairly transparent. Remember, UNIX was designed for exactly such a use case. Bell Labs had an assortment of different computer hardware, but they wanted to run the same OS and software on all of them.

I remember the problems that game developers apparently had with Playstation 3 game development,

I don't know the specifics, but I gather POWER is much better supported by popular Linux distros and software, these days. Also, PS3 was weird, in various ways. And it ran some Free BSD derivative, IIRC.

Speaking of PS3, I wonder if the PS3 emulator supports POWER. Probably not, but if so, I'd wager it should run rather well. Especially if you had >= 8 cores.

[cybertraveler]

How practical would a Power 9 based PC be as your regular desktop? Is there full Linux OS support with Ubuntu, Fedora or something else? Is there a GNU compiler port and any X86 binary compatibility tools at all? Will I be able to do the basics of emails, write documents and surf the web. I remember the problems that game developers apparently had with Playstation 3 game development, but that may have been with the other parts of the system than the Power PC CPUs. I would very much like a non-X86 desktop again (had SUN workstations in the past).

I'd genuinely like to see all these questions answered.

I've been following Talos a bit and I've seen that they've got a lot of popular software working on their system, but is it consumer ready? IE if I was to buy one of these boards, would I still be able to do everything I can currently do with an AMD64 GNU/Linux desktop without having to spend hours hacking things together, applying fixes or manually installing & compiling things?

[lkundrak]

As long as you don't need to run x86/x86-64 binaries on it, it should be fairly transparent. Remember, UNIX was designed for exactly such a use case. Bell Labs had an assortment of different computer hardware, but they wanted to run the same OS and software on all of them.

Not sure if this is completely correct. UNIX was basically a PDP-11 operating system. Bell Labs were not particularly concerned about portability. However, thanks to extensive use of the C language from fourth edition on, it turned out that porting to other machines is practical. The first port to a non PDP hardware was to a 32-bit Interdata machine, and involved rewriting significant chunks of the remaining assembly to C and a brand new portable C compiler. Thus the 7th edition can reasonably be considered the first truly portable UNIX. Only at that point Bell Labs gained interest in their ports (which might be what you're referring to). This effort, in turn, also gave rise to BSD (outside Bell Labs, of course), which was truly the first UNIX that could support multiple architectures from a single source tree.

Not that it matters all that much. The Linux kernel doesn't share the UNIX lineage, what makes it portable is the use of a high level language (perhaps most of the contemporary OSes are written in C, including Windows NT). What truly matters, 50+ years since UNIX was conceived, is the availability of distributions programs beyond the kernel.

Your point that Linux is doing well here is correct. Fedora/RHEL and Debian, likely the most important Linux distributions, support POWER just fine.

[torsionbar28]

And IBM's prices are meant to be comparable to EPYC and Xeon SP, which I think they generally are.

Edzachary. I always lol when people come out of the woodwork to talk about how "overpriced" a piece of enterprise grade equipment is, compared with their budget gamer i3 peecee.

[torsionbar28]

Your point that Linux is doing well here is correct. Fedora/RHEL and Debian, likely the most important Linux distributions, support POWER just fine.

The Official support by Red Hat is huge. This serious corporate backing means Linux will be very mature and stable indeed on POWER hardware. This is a Real Good Thing.

[cybertraveler]

The Official support by Red Hat is huge. This serious corporate backing means Linux will be very mature and stable indeed on POWER hardware. This is a Real Good Thing.

Is this Red Hat support of POWER hardware part of a long term strategy or do they actually have important customers using POWER hardware? Do you know?

[torsionbar28]

I'd genuinely like to see all these questions answered.

I've been following Talos a bit and I've seen that they've got a lot of popular software working on their system, but is it consumer ready? IE if I was to buy one of these boards, would I still be able to do everything I can currently do with an AMD64 GNU/Linux desktop without having to spend hours hacking things together, applying fixes or manually installing & compiling things?

Look at which packages are available in the official RHEL repo for POWER. Those will all be stable production ready packages.

[torsionbar28]

Is this Red Hat support of POWER hardware part of a long term strategy or do they actually have important customers using POWER hardware? Do you know?

Yes Red Hat has partnered with IBM on this for several years now, it isn't new. RHEL is officially supported on only two platforms - x86 and POWER. So yes, there are enough large enterprise customers running RHEL on POWER to make it worthwhile and profitable for Red Hat to officially support it. That means Red Hat & IBM have been actively submitting POWER related patches upstream to the various FOSS projects, including the kernel, for years now.

IMO IBM saw the writing on the wall, and recognized a while back that the Linux market was growing faster than their own AIX operating system, which is why IBM has been such a big Linux player in recent years.

This is the most powerful supercomputer in the world right now. Does this meet your definition of an "important customer"? lol.

Summit, an IBM-built supercomputer now running at the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), captured the number one spot with a performance of 122.3 petaflops on High Performance Linpack (HPL), the benchmark used to rank the TOP500 list. Summit has 4,356 nodes, each one equipped with two 22-core Power9 CPUs, and six NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs. The nodes are linked together with a Mellanox dual-rail EDR InfiniBand network.

It runs RHEL 7 on POWER9: https://www.top500.org/system/179397

The full list: https://www.top500.org/list/2018/06/ Notice that 3 of the top 10 are running Linux on POWER.

[Adarion]

I wonder how that Marvell-Controller goes along with being blob free, let alone even working in Linux (or BSD) at all. Marvell sold a lot of chips with bad support in the past.

[cybertraveler]

Yes Red Hat has partnered with IBM on this for several years now, it isn't new. RHEL is officially supported on only two platforms - x86 and POWER. So yes, there are enough large enterprise customers running RHEL on POWER to make it worthwhile and profitable for Red Hat to officially support it. That means Red Hat & IBM have been actively submitting POWER related patches upstream to the various FOSS projects, including the kernel, for years now.

IMO IBM saw the writing on the wall, and recognized a while back that the Linux market was growing faster than their own AIX operating system, which is why IBM has been such a big Linux player in recent years.

This is the most powerful supercomputer in the world right now. Does this meet your definition of an "important customer"? lol.

Summit, an IBM-built supercomputer now running at the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), captured the number one spot with a performance of 122.3 petaflops on High Performance Linpack (HPL), the benchmark used to rank the TOP500 list. Summit has 4,356 nodes, each one equipped with two 22-core Power9 CPUs, and six NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs. The nodes are linked together with a Mellanox dual-rail EDR InfiniBand network.

It runs RHEL 7 on POWER9: https://www.top500.org/system/179397

The full list: https://www.top500.org/list/2018/06/ Notice that 3 of the top 10 are running Linux on POWER.

Very nice! Thanks for the info.

My question was genuine btw. I wasn't trying to make a claim or a point. I genuinely don't know much about POWER market penetration.