Welcome. Let's talk a bit more about Linux running on IBM Power Systems. A few years ago, a frequent source of confusion among computer engineering professionals was the use of Endianness in computer architecture. Now, what does that mean? Well, it all started when an Israeli computer scientist, Danny Cohen, suggested that there's a small war going on in computer science to answer this question; what is the proper byte order in messages? He linked it to the Endian war. It's still not clear? Well, let's digress a bit. To answer what Endian war means, we have to go further back in history to 1726 to pick up a copy of Irish writer Jonathan Swift's, Gulliver's Travels. The term is derive from one of the satirical conflicts in the book in which two religious sects of Lilliputians are divided between those who crack open-less soft boiled eggs from the little end, they are the Little Endians and those who use the big end, the Big Endians. Now, let's get back to computer science. Let's assume that we have a hexadecimal number that we'd like to store in computer memory. Each character in a hexadecimal represents four bits. Let's assume this number to be 12, 34, 56, 78. The leftmost byte, 12 is the most significant byte, and the right-most byte, 78 is the least significant byte. In Big Endian, the most significant byte is stored in the smallest memory location. In Little Endian, the least significant byte is stored in the smallest memory location. We see that in Big Endian, it's stored as 12, 34, 56, 78, and in Little Endian, it's stored as 78, 56, 34, 12. IBM Power Systems used to be primarily Big Endian a few years ago, but now supports Little Endian too, and Little Endian has become the memory storage method of choice. For example, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, since version 7 has supported both versions. If you or your client is using POWER7, note that it's likely you're using the Big Endian inversion. Little Endian has become popular since IBM Power version 8. Other popular Linux distributions like SUSE Enterprise Linux and Ubuntu now release only Little Endian versions. It doesn't hurt to check which version you're install the uses before installing your operating system. Now, we do not want to present the line of server hardware in detail. But for those of you who are curious, let's take a quick overview. The POWER8 server line can be split into three categories. First, the Scale-Out Server line, secondly, Scale-Up Enterprise line, and finally the OpenPOWER Linux Cluster systems. Under the Scale-Out line, we have servers like the 822, 814, and 824. These numbers do stand for something. The first 8, that first digit, well, it belongs to the POWER8 line-up. The second digit, 1 or 2, stands for the number of sockets available in the server which houses the processor cores. The final digit, 2 or 4, stands for the height of the server, 2 stands for U2 height and 4 for 4U height. The L suffix stands for Linux only server. Similarly, we have other servers in the Scale-Up Enterprise and the Linux cluster family. Now, let's see the POWER9 family. The POWER9 Server lineup can be categorized into three groups. First, we have the Mission Critical Workloads. Mission Critical applications which use technologies like SAP HANA, and SQL or NoSQL databases require impenetrable security to be baked into the system, as well as the reliability and high-performance clients have come to expect from POWER systems. Then we have the Big Data Workloads category. The LC line of servers can crush through large volumes of dataset for example Hadoop and Spark workloads running on POWER systems. This service bring the compute density and the storage capacity to satisfy even the most demanding Big Data Workloads. Finally, we have service suited for Enterprise Artificial Intelligence or AI Workloads. The AC922 server has been demonstrating the deep learning performance and accuracy that can only be delivered with a combination of IBM POWER9, NVIDIA GPUs, and the NVLink technology that ties the CPUs and GPUs together, and specifically, engineered software to be able to work on the most complex AI models. The naming convention is similar to POWER8, except some newer terms were introduced. For example, H stands for SAP HANA optimize server. AC stands for Accelerated Computing, S for Scale-Out server, and E for Enterprise Scale-Up server. The OpenPOWER Foundation was founded in 2013 as an open technical membership organization that will enable data centers to rethink their approach to technology. Since then, we've had several major companies join and use the POWER platform for their applications. Member companies can customize POWER processes to satisfy their business requirements. Its mission statement is through the growing open ecosystem of POWER architecture and its associated technologies, the OpenPOWER Foundation facilitates its members to share expertise, investment, and intellectual property to serve the evolving needs of all end users. For more information about that, go to openpowerfoundation.org.
