POTSDAM -- Clarkson University has joined the OpenPOWER Foundation, an open development community based on the POWER microprocessor architecture.

POWER CPU denotes a series of high-performance microprocessors designed by IBM.

Clarkson joins a growing roster of technology organizations working collaboratively to build advanced server, networking, storage and acceleration technology as well as open source software aimed at delivering more choice, control and flexibility to developers of next-generation, hyper-scale and cloud data centers.

The group makes POWER hardware and software available to open development for the first time, as well as making POWER intellectual property licensable to others, greatly expanding the ecosystem of innovators on the platform.

With the POWER hardware and software, the researchers at Clarkson, especially the faculty in the Wallace H. Coulter School of Engineering's Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, will be able to elevate their research in multicore/multithreading architectures, the interaction between system software and micro-architecture, and hardware acceleration techniques based on the POWER microprocessor architecture. The Clarkson faculty intend to join the OpenPOWER Foundation's hardware architecture, system software, and hardware accelerator workgroups.

"As a member of the OpenPOWER Foundation, we will be able to explore the state-of-the-art hardware and software design used in supercomputer and cloud computing platforms, as well as collaborating with researchers from industry and other institutions," said assistant professor of electrical & computer engineering Chen Liu, who is leading the computer architecture and microprocessor engineering laboratory at Clarkson.

To learn more about OpenPOWER, visit www.openpowerfoundation.org.