Canonical's John Dolen reports that IBM announced on the day of October 8, 2015, that they extended their range of Ubuntu-supported systems with the newly introduced IBM Power Systems LC models, which promise to run big data workloads at half the cost of x86-based servers.

The new single and dual socket server IBM Power Systems LC models are now available thanks to the joint collaboration of Canonical, IBM, and the members of the OpenPOWER Foundation, including Nvidia, Mellanox, Wistron, and Tyan. IBM's new systems will support the latest Server Edition of the Ubuntu Linux operating system and were engineered to support cognitive workloads and big data. Canonical will make sure that Ubuntu will be available for the new IBM Power Systems LC models when they are released later this year.

"This announcement builds upon the open innovation and benefits which our mutual clients are already reaping from OpenPOWER Foundation. Collaboration involving POWER8 Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface (CAPI) is a great example," says John Dolen. "Researchers at the University of Toronto are using Ubuntu with POWER8 CAPI, attached to a field programmable gate array (FPGA), to speed up clinical simulations, involving massive amounts of data, with the goal of improving treatments for cancer patients."

Juju Charms and POWER8

In the press release (attached at the end of the article for reference), Canonical notes that IBM’s new Power Systems LC models address the requirements of high-performance computing and managed service providers, and that their continued collaboration with IBM has made sure that Juju Charms are now available for the POWER8 family of superscalar symmetric multiprocessors, which customers can use for their continuous changing needs.

Canonical and IBM will also be present at the upcoming IBM Insight2015 event that will take place later this month, where they will demonstrate the real power of Ubuntu Linux, IBM Power Systems, Juju Charms, and POWER8, and how it is to build and deploy a production cluster based on the Apache Spark technologies, so make sure that you attend the event if you're curious to learn more about cloud computing and the latest Linux trends.