POWER7 is a family of superscalar symmetric multiprocessors based on the Power Architecture released in 2010 that succeeded the POWER6. POWER7 was developed by IBM at several sites including IBM's Rochester, MN; Austin, TX; Essex Junction, Vermont; T. J. Watson Research Center, NY; Bromont, QC and IBM Deutschland Research & Development GmbH, Böblingen, Germany laboratories. IBM announced servers based on POWER7 on 8 February 2010.
IBM won a $244 million DARPA contract in November 2006 to develop a petascale supercomputer architecture before the end of 2010 in the HPCS project. The contract also states that the architecture shall be available commercially. IBM's proposal, PERCS (Productive, Easy-to-use, Reliable Computer System), which won them the contract, is based on the POWER7 processor, AIX operating system and General Parallel File System.
One feature that IBM and DARPA collaborated on is modifying the addressing and page table hardware to support global shared memory space for POWER7 clusters. This enables research scientists to program a cluster as if it were a single system, without using message passing. From a productivity standpoint, this is essential since some scientists are not conversant with MPI or other parallel programming techniques used in clusters.
Last night as I lay dreaming of pleasant days gone by
Me mind being bent on rambling, to Ireland I did fly
I stepped on board a vision, and I followed with a will
'Til next I came to anchor at the cross at Spancil Hill
It being on the 23rd of June, the day before the fair
When Ireland's sons and daughters and friends assembled there
The young, the old, the brave and the bold came, their duty to fulfill
At the parish church in Clooney, a mile from Spancil Hill
I went to see me neighbors, to see what they might say
The old ones were all dead and gone, the young ones turning gray
But I met the tailor Quigley, he's as bold as ever still
Ah, he used to mend me britches when I lived in Spancil Hill
I paid a flying visit to my first and only love
She's as white as any lily, gentle as a dove
And she threw her arms around me saying, "Johnny, I love you still"
As she's Nell the farmer's daughter and the pride of Spancil Hill
I dreamed I held and kissed her as in the days of yore
Ah Johnny, you're only jokin', as many's the time before
Then the cock, he crew in the morning, he crew both loud and shrill