Recently I found that quite a few of my Twitter and Mastodon followers are working in high-performance computing (HPC). At first I was surprised because I’m not a HPC person, even if I love high performance computers. Then I realized that there are quite few overlaps, and one of my best friends is also deeply involved in HPC. My work, logging, is also a fundamental part of HPC environments. Let’s start with a direct connection to HPC: one of my best friends, Gabor Samu, is working in HPC.

Last weekend I was in Vienna for EuroBSDcon, an event where BSD users are gathering from Europe (and all around the world). And while you could follow the event online, to me, the greatest value of the conference was not in the talks themselves (not to lessen their value of course, as they were fantastic) but rather in meeting people during the hallway session. The line-up consisted of sudo and syslog-ng users, BSD users and developers, and even some people from history books :-)

This week I am talking to Timothy Pearson of Raptor Engineering. He is behind the Talos II and Blackbird boards for IBM POWER9 CPUs. His major claim is creating the first fully owner controlled general purpose computer in a long while. My view of the Talos II and Blackbird systems is that these boards helped to revitalize the open source ecosystem around POWER more than any other efforts (See also: https://peter.

The first time I heard about 21unity was when I read the announcement: 21unity Joins OpenPOWER Foundation. I immediately became interested in the company, as it combines two things I am interested in: POWER and open source. Among others 21unity has its own cloud based on the POWER platform and provides Nextcloud as a service. I tried to refresh my German knowledge and read their website, but the more I read the more interesting it got and the more questions I had.

I’m considered to be a server guy. I had access to some really awesome server machines. Still, when computers come up in discussions, we are almost exclusively talk about workstations. Even if servers are an important part of my life, that’s “just” work. I loved the SGI workstations I had access to during my university years. Many of my friends still occasionally boot their 30 years old Amiga boxes. The cult of Amiga One would say that the Amiga was popular in the eighties and early nineties.

My favorite and most used service for developers is the openSUSE Build Service (OBS). This is where I build syslog-ng packages first, before anywhere else. OBS is open source, highly flexible software to build software packages, and the instance at https://build.opensuse.org/ is free to use for anyone to build open source software. Best of all, it supports multiple architectures, including POWER. Open Build Service Actually the OBS acronym stands for two things.

I’m happy to announce that I became an IBM Power Champion for the year 2022. This blog is long overdue, however with the conflict raging in our neighbor country, Ukraine, I just did not feel the strength to write about anything. In this blog I try to introduce myself and share my plans for this year. But before doing so, let me share my new badge with you: IBM Champion 2022 badge My background My title at work is “Open Source Evangelist” and Power does not appear anywhere in my job description.

I’m not a POWER (or recently: Power) expert, only an enthusiastic user and advocate. Still, in the past couple of weeks a number of people from around the world asked my opinion how the POWER architecture could be kept relevant. This blog is really just an opinion, as I do not have the financial means to go ahead. It is full of compromises some people are not willing to make. However, I think this is the safest and fastest way forward.

Last week I participated the OpenPower Summit. I enjoyed it, even if I was on sick leave with a fever. There were many interesting talks, ranging from open source and education through Power10 to instruction development. All sessions were recorded. Hopefully recordings will also be shared, as I did not have the strength to visit all the sessions I wanted. And, as usual, some of the interesting talks were given in parallel.

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.