IBM (my employer) recently announced  the new S822LC for HPC POWER8+NVLINK NVIDIA P100 GPUs server (press release, IBM Systems Blog, The Register). The “For HPC” suffix on the model number is significant, as the S822LC is a different machine. What makes the “for HPC” variant different is that the POWER8 CPU has (in addition to PCIe), logic for NVLink to connect the CPU to NVIDIA GPUs.

There’s also the NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPUs which are NVIDIA’s latest in an SXM2 form factor, but instead of delving into GPUs, I’m going to tell you how to compile the firmware for this machine.

You see, this is an OpenPOWER machine. It’s an OpenPOWER machine where the vendor (in this case IBM) has worked to get all the needed code upstream, so you can see exactly what goes into a firmware build.

To build the latest host firmware (you can cross compile on x86 as we use buildroot to build a cross compiler):

git clone --recursive https://github.com/open-power/op-build.git
cd op-build
. op-build-env
op-build garrison_defconfig
op-build

That’s it! Give it a while and you’ll end up with output/images/garrison.pnor – which is a firmware image to flash onto PNOR. The machine name is garrison as that’s the code name for the “S822LC for HPC” (you may see Minsky in the press, but that’s a rather new code name, Garrison has been around for a lot longer as a name).