Think 2019 — Part 3. In Part Two, I wrote about IBM’s Cloud…
By: Sasha Lazarevic
Tags: Ibm Summit, Think 2019, Power9, Quantum Computing, IBM

In Part Two, I wrote about IBM’s Cloud strategy. But the infrastructure is what powers cloud computing.

Infrastructure

This part was very rich with demonstrations

Power9

IBM showed new and improved Power S922 server. In the standard edition, it works in similar ways like previous Power machines. But as of now, it will also be available in IBM Cloud, not only on-premise. General availability is as of now in the US , and starting from Q3 also in Europe. The big news is that the customers who use Power on-premise in their own data centers, can also benefit from new consumption-based subscription model, similar like being in the public cloud. This is very interesting for companies that prefer a lower upfront payment and shorter time commitment. The prerequisite is Power S922 model with minimum 12 months commitment.

Power S922 is much more powerful when used with GPUs. It is actually the best machine in the market for deep learning workloads. It features NVLink between the CPUs and GPUs with 100GB/s bandwith for 6 GPUs and unified memory space for all CPUs and GPUs. Ideal use case is as an accelerator of deep learning algorithms. And together with Power AI (set of libraries for machine learning), Power S922 will be also available in IBM Cloud as Watson Machine Learning Accelerator. Watson ML users will be able to select it as one of the training environments. This is an amazing machine, which is also used as building block for IBM Summit , the fastest supercomputer in the world

IBM Summit has been installed in Oak Ridge National Lab, and is the only machine in the world that can reach 1 Exaflop per second. It is consisted of 256 racks full of Power S922 with 200’000 cores and 27’000 GPUs. It is currently used for medicine, astronomy and climate change related research. It is a master piece of system design. You can see here how one rack looks like.

Quantum

Huge interest around the booth with quantum computer and for quantum presentations. Visitors could see super-conducting quantum system with the real chip and wiring for microwave controls. No new announcements for Think 2019, the new machine with 50 qubits is still cooking, nothing is known about its performance, the architecture or general availability. There was a number of noteworthy sessions around quantum computing and its impact on the future IT and various potential use cases.

But we’ve learned that IBM Research is very busy with working on new quantum-safe lattice-based encryption algorithms. It will not rely on the product of two numbers (like RSA), but on proximity function in n-dimensional space. First offering is expected for zSystems, followed by HW appliances. Here below is how it looked like. While waiting for new 50 qubits machine, practice on the smaller one : https://quantumexperience.ng.bluemix.net/qx . You can also play a quantum video game on your smartphone : https://helloquantum.mybluemix.net/ . Quantum is fun, and you will learn a lot about quantum physics (even more than you ever planned

Mainframe

Mainframe is continuously being updated and prepared for the hybrid cloud. IBM showcased several new features :

zDevOps with UrbanCode Deploy for z Systems

Containers for z System through ICP for LinuxONE

z/OS Cloud Broker for ICP, which exposes and integrates z/OS based services into ICP for modern, container-based application development.

Big idea is actually that external, open-source developers’ communities will have better and easier access to deep IBM resources when modernizing these mission critical applications. Don’t forget that 90% of big banking transactional systems run on IBM mainframes.

Storage

No big news here. IBM showcased some of the existing technologies like FlashSystem 9100, Storewize V7000, and IBM Spectrum Scale which is used in IBM Summit supercomputer. There is a new and interesting product Spectrum Discoverer that creates metadata of the existing data, and emphasis on hwo IBM performs HW-based storage encryption of the files that need to be stored off-chain for Blockchain applications.

Databases

A lot of talk and some interesting announcements :

Db2 AI database . This is very powerful database for ML. It includes data virtualization so that no ETL is needed, open-source drivers for Python, Jupyter Notebooks, Node-Red, and it comes now with self-tuning and ML-based SQL optimizer. The objective is to accelerate AI development.

. This is very powerful database for ML. It includes data virtualization so that no ETL is needed, open-source drivers for Python, Jupyter Notebooks, Node-Red, and it comes now with self-tuning and ML-based SQL optimizer. The objective is to accelerate AI development. Support for multi-cloud . Db2 Datawarehouse is also available on AWS

. Db2 Datawarehouse is also available on AWS This is part of larger portfolio named IBM Hybrid Data Management Platform, which includes Db2 Database, Db2 Datawarehouse, and can be consumed as service either on Cloud or on-prem

All in all, the infrastructure, whether standard, high-end, or extreme gives IBM absolute advantage when it is about private portion of the hybrid cloud, in terms of performance, reliability, scalability and flexibility.

You can continue reading my story about Think 2019 in Part 4 of this blog post about IBM news in the domains of Blockchain, Microservices, and Application Modernization.