Red Hat launches support for the latest IBM hardware in Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Today we are happy to announce the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4 for Power Little Endian (POWER9), the latest version of the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform for IBM Power Systems. This release offers customers a choice of a powerful, flexible operating system backbone designed to address enterprise IT needs across multiple architectures and signifies a culmination of multi-year upstream collaboration on enabling support for IBM Power servers equipped with new POWER9 processors.

Red Hat and IBM have a long history of collaborating on Linux, going back more than 18 years. We laid the groundwork for supporting POWER9 processors several years ago and continue to collaborate with IBM to enable broader architecture support for IBM Power Systems across Red Hat’s portfolio. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4 for Power Little Endian (POWER9) release brings support for containers with Open Container Initiative (OCI)-compatible runtime and system images, and single-host KVM virtualization, enabling customers to increase system utilization by running multiple applications side-by-side.

In recent months, we have seen interest from customers for solutions based on hardware designs that use IBM Power Little Endian (ppc64le) architecture. Several interesting designs focused on artificial intelligence, machine learning, and advanced analytics are being developed by OpenPOWER members using advanced system interconnect technologies and graphics processing unit (GPU)-aided computing. Because this architecture and the associated ecosystem is still evolving, we plan to continue our work with IBM and the OpenPOWER ecosystem to enable new and refreshed hardware.

Early adopters of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4 for Power Little Endian (POWER9) include the Summit supercomputer, which is currently being installed at Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility. With an expected computational performance five to 10 times faster than its predecessor (Titan), this machine is a part of Department of Energy’s (DOE) CORAL initiative. This system will be used for the most demanding scientific and national security simulation and modeling applications and can enable continued U.S. leadership in computing. Red Hat is proud to support some of the world’s most advanced supercomputers that enable world-class research for significant advances in science.

Part of Red Hat’s multi-architecture initiative, this release is another example of how Red Hat strives to enable our customers to design and build infrastructure based on their choice of commercially available hardware architectures. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4 for Power Little Endian (POWER9) is available to current customers with an active Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4 for Power Little Endian (LE) subscriptions. New customers can download a 30-day evaluation version of this software release and select a link to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4 for Power Little Endian.​

If you are attending SuperComputing17 in Denver, Nov. 13-16, and would like to learn more, visit Red Hat at booth #1763.