What’s Up at POWERUp
Kicking off its biggest event of the year, COMMON celebrates advances in hardware, software and talent development on IBM Power
At POWERUp 2024, IBM i CTO Steve Will threw down the gauntlet, declaring that the time had come for an AI-driven code assistant for IBM i. In announcing the effort, he called on the IBM i community to help make such a tool a reality by submitting RPG code to train an AI model that would promise to make developers’ lives easier.
Just one day shy of one year later, Will was back on the POWERUp stage, introducing watsonx Code Assistant for i, which promises to help developers understand, enhance and maintain their code.
The debut of watsonx Code Assistant for i is just one of the highlights of POWERUp 2025, taking place May 19-22 at Disneyland in Anaheim, California. A selection of developers will get their hands on the code assistant this summer, Will promised, but a select few have already had a chance to experiment with the tool.
One of those developers is Jasmine Kaczmarek, an IBM Champion and vice president of technology at M.R. Williams, a supplier of products for the convenience store industry. “I’m one of the first people to get to play with this tool, which is very exciting for me,” Kaczmarek said. “I was mostly interested because I wanted to see how I can improve the productivity of my team. We have three developers. We have a 24-7 business. We need to pump out the code.”
To illustrate what the code assistant can do, Kaczmarek recalled an instance where her company’s invoicing wasn’t working. After her senior developer spent seven hours investigating the issue, Kaczmarek turned to watsonx Code Assistant for i.
“I played with it, found the problem within 20 minutes, fixed the data—it was a very complex point calculation; Watsonx explained it fantastically to me—and had it back up and running within 20 minutes,” Kaczmarek said. “That, for me, really solidified that this is going to be a fabulous tool for big shops and small shops alike.”
Power11 Anticipation
“It’s a fascinating time to be in IT,” Steve Sibley, vice president of product management at IBM, said at the opening session. More than that, it’s a “really exciting time for IBM i,” he said.
“The last three years have been pretty remarkable from an IBM standpoint in seeing the success that we’re driving around the platform. We continue to be a global platform. We continue to grow from a business perspective. In fact, IBM i has grown double digits for the last few years from an IBM business perspective,” Sibley said.
And Power 11 hasn’t even come out yet. The wait should end in Q3 2025, Bill Starke, Power processor chief architect, said during his May 19 hardware roadmap session. “It’s not just, ‘Hey, we spun out the processor silicon and put new stuff in there.’ We’re adding value at all levels of the stack.”
This comes as hardware engineers face the challenge of diminishing returns as chip technology progresses. “At an industry level, we’ve been riding this beautiful semiconductor scaling curve for over 50 years, everything getting better, smaller, faster,” Starke explained. “But at some point, everything gets so much better, so much smaller, so much faster that you’re getting down to a scale where you hit diminishing returns. I mean, you can’t make something out of something that’s smaller than an atom.”
The solution, he said, is to find more more innovative ways of formulating and packaging silicon. “We’re building a whole extra layer of silicon between the module and the processor chip. And this whole extra layer of silicon is strictly there for energy delivery and energy optimization,” he said, citing just one example of Power11’s hardware advances. “But the big thing is we’re also extending the headroom of the whole system. So in addition, we can even put more energy in and get even more performance out of the more energy.”
Hardware Improvements
Starke also spoke of Power11’s improvements in memory architecture, thermal management and AI processing. “Another big piece that I love about this is where we’re going with AI acceleration,” he said. While Power11 can accommodate IBM’s new PCIe-attached Spyre AI accelerator, the system will build upon the AI foundation that was laid by Power10’s Matrix Math Accelerator, which Starke said is about “putting in the right horsepower directly in the microprocessor.”
With that, the hardware guru championed a right-tool-for-the-job approach to AI, likening it to choosing a vehicle to get groceries. For this job, a sedan would be the sensible choice, as opposed to a cargo plane. “You do not need a cargo plane to buy three bags of groceries. That sounds absurd. Who would ever think about doing that?” Starke said. “Well, actually, if you do the math, that’s the kind of overkill that you are seeing in some people’s AI deployments. They’re going out and getting super-high-powered Nvidia GPUs that are aimed at massive large model training.”
Starke took the analogy further: If using the Matrix Math Accelerator is the sedan you take grocery shopping, then the Spyre accelerator is the U-Haul you rent for a move across town—as in, for enterprise workloads.
Software Updates
While the IBM Power world waits for Power11, IBM i’s newest OS has been out for over a month. Wennie Allen, the new director of product management for IBM Power, explained the significance of IBM i 7.6. “The headline here for 7.6 is multifactor authentication, MFA,” Allen said. “Now, this isn’t just an afterthought, this is really woven deeply into the core of the system. So it is embedded and integrated native to the operating system.” She also trumpeted IBM i 7.6’s enhanced encryption and a more robust, developer-friendly Db2.
And then, there are the IBM products that have been around for some time but elude the attention of some in the Power community. “I like to think that everybody knows about Power Virtual Server, but I’m often surprised that people don’t know that you can actually extend your IBM i environment into the cloud and modernize it in that way,” Anthony Ciccone, who leads the IBM Systems as-a-service product team, said.
Power VS, IBM’s cloud environment for Power workloads, “provides you easy access to over 250 IBM cloud services that can help you modernize IBM i applications,” Ciccone explained. And last December, Power VS was augmented by Migrate While Active, “which helps you get to the cloud faster and with less disruption in your business.”
By bringing data off premises, Power VS also increases resilience in the face of threats including natural disasters, Ciccone noted. “Even though we make the most resilient servers on the planet with IBM Power, I still believe that even with the new advances in Power11, they’re not waterproof,” he deadpanned.
Embracing the Next Generation
While the Power community gets acquainted with the new software and hardware, another new resource at their disposal is the IBM Systems Education & Training Showcase, which was introduced at POWERUp’s opening session.
The product of a partnership between IBM and TechChannel, the Showcase features informative articles about IBM Power basics and efforts to train people to run the platform. Alongside that guidance is a directory of tools, programs and services to help newcomers and veterans alike enhance their IBM Power skills.
As COMMON celebrates its 65th anniversary this year, POWERUp 2025 also marks the debut of several new features for the conference itself, as organizers look to encourage more networking and fun. To spur such conviviality, this year’s conference is introducing pin trading, among other new activities. For the pin trading program, attendees were each given six pins representing different hobbies and encouraged to collect the pins that most represent their interests.
There are also special pins that can be obtained at various locations at the conference, including one honoring the late Fred Pritchard, who was a member of COMMON for 30 years and served the user group’s IT Manager. Pritchard passed away after NAViGATE last year. “We miss him dearly,” COMMON President Floyd Del Muro said. In addition to the pin, Pritchard’s visage is featured in this year’s cooperative watercolor mural that conference attendees can
Organizers are also hoping a new scavenger hunt and trivia night can also help bring people together. The idea of the new offerings is to increase the appeal of POWERUp for the next generation of technologists who will keep the platform thriving.
“Our goal,” Del Muro said, “is to ensure the next 65 years.”