Why people think that I am an IBM Power Champion?
Whenever I talked to people about POWER, someone asked if I am an IBM Power Champion. My response was that I do not even know what it is, and I am not affiliated with IBM in any way. Recently I came across a blog by Torbjörn Appehl which describes what is an IBM Power Champion and lists the European champions: https://builtonpower.com/2021/09/the-2021-ibm-power-champions-in-europe/.
Finally I know what an IBM Power Champion is, and I feel honored to be mistaken to be one of them :-) Normally I do not care much about titles: I have seen too many empty people with well sounding titles, and fantastic people without any titles. Even with this background I’d be proud to wear the IBM Power Champion badge. However, being a loud POWER advocate does not mean that I feel that I am active enough to warrant this badge.
I must admit, that knowing what an IBM Power Champion is, I am not surprised at all, that I was mistaken for an IBM Power Champion. I am a long time POWER user. Started with RS6000 boxes almost 30 years ago. I helped to install the largest POWER server in Hungary at the turn of the century. I supported Linux on the Genesi Pegasos, a PowerPC workstation, for many years. I was an active contributor and moderator on the power-developer forums and on power.org. And recently I support syslog-ng on POWER. POWER9 provided the best syslog-ng performance for years, and I have a strong suspicion that after a short break the release of POWER10 gives back the performance crown to the POWER architecture. Tead the article I wrote based on my OpenPOWER conference talk last year to see my history in detail and that I am not that active recently: I’m a POWER user
So why do people have the impression that I actively work on POWER technologies? I guess it’s because of my job. If I am enthusiastic about a technology, I talk about it loud and clear. Even if it is not part of my job. And my enthusiasm is contagious. I am a technology evangelist, and by definition it means that I advocate technologies and help them in many possible ways. For my job I work with sudo and syslog-ng, however if I like something, it receives the same treatment – in my free time. You can learn more about being an open source evangelist from my article on opensource.com: What is an open source evangelist?
Of course, I have plans related to POWER, even if I’m not too active. I’d love to test syslog-ng on a POWER10 server. However I’m patient. No matter how much I love syslog-ng, an IBM Power E1080 server is an overkill for syslog-ng both in price and performance. Especially that syslog-ng has an upper limit of 64 threads, and this server has more cores than that :-) But once POWER10 is more widespread and there are smaller boxes available as well, I’d love to verify my assumption, that POWER10 is the currently available best CPU for syslog-ng :-)
And what can I say to POWER and POWER users? Live long and prosper!