IBM open-sources PowerAI as OpenCE

News from today's COVID-19 socially distanced virtual OpenPOWER Summit: IBM announced the open-sourcing of their PowerAI package today as OpenCE, the Open Cognitive Environment for deep learning and machine learning applications. The code should build on any Linux-based OpenPOWER system, including Raptor-family workstations and servers, and the Github repository contains everything needed to build Tensorflow, Pytorch, XGBoost and related projects and dependencies. If building binaries from scratch leaves you cold waiting for the goodies, Oregon State University simultaneously announced plans to offer pre-built ppc64le binaries for each upcoming tagged release both with and without CUDA support. Unfortunately, not everything is open: you'll still need to register and download a separate blob from Nvidia if you intend to use CUDA, even though it can be reportedly downloaded at no cost afterwards, and if you do you'll naturally be limited to Nvidia GPUs (which you can't use for 3D acceleration on OpenPOWER currently due to the lack of a working open-source driver). Still, here's a high-power option for your machines coming from someone who knows how to optimize for the platform, and Raptor's PowerAI-specific SKU is a turnkey package configured expressly for that purpose (and it's even in stock). Perhaps OpenCE is something they could preinstall for even greater value now that it's available.