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A Power Technical Blog

OpenPOWER Summit Europe 2018: A Software Developer's Introduction to OpenCAPI

Last month, I was in Amsterdam at OpenPOWER Summit Europe. It was great to see so much interest in OpenPOWER, with a particularly strong contingent of researchers sharing how they're exploiting the unique advantages of OpenPOWER platforms, and a number of OpenPOWER hardware partners announcing products.

(It was also my first time visiting Europe, so I had a lot of fun exploring Amsterdam, taking a few days off in Vienna, then meeting some of my IBM Linux Technology Centre colleagues in Toulouse. I also now appreciate just what ~50 hours on planes does to you!)

One particular area which got a lot of attention at the Summit was OpenCAPI, an open coherent high-performance bus interface designed for accelerators, which is supported on POWER9. We had plenty of talks about OpenCAPI and the interesting work that is already happening with OpenCAPI accelerators.

I was invited to present on the Linux Technology Centre's work on enabling OpenCAPI from the software side. In this talk, I outline the OpenCAPI software stack and how you can interface with an OpenCAPI device through the ocxl kernel driver and the libocxl userspace library.

My slides are available, though you'll want to watch the presentation for context.

Apart from myself, the OzLabs team were well represented at the Summit:

Unfortunately none of their videos are up yet, but they'll be there over the next few weeks. Keep an eye on the Summit website and the Summit YouTube playlist, where you'll find all the rest of the Summit content.

If you've got any questions about OpenCAPI feel free to leave a comment!