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IBM's newest technology, the Power Edge of Network (PowerEN) processor, merges network and server attributes to create a new class of wire-speed processor. PowerEN is a hybrid computer that employs: massive multithreading capabilities, integrated I/O and unique special-purpose accelerators for compression, cryptography, pattern matching, XML and Network processing.As a novel architecture, the PowerEN processor offers fertile ground for research. It can facilitate the development of faster applications in many fields of computer science such as Networking, Cryptography, Virtualization, Bioinformatics, SOA, and Systems. IBM encourages academic research and has set up the "PowerEN Developer Cloud" infrastructure to allow it.

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This paper describes a recent system-level trend toward the use of massive on-chip parallelism combined with efficient hardware accelerators and integrated networking to enable new classes of applications and computing-systems functionality. This system transition is driven by semiconductor physics and emerging network-application requirements. In contrast to general-purpose approaches, workload and network-optimized computing provides significant cost, performance, and power advantages relative to historical frequency-scaling approaches in a serial computational model. We highlight the advantages of on-chip network optimization that enables efficient computation and new services at the network edge of the data center. Software and application development challenges are presented, and a service-oriented architecture application example is shown that characterizes the power and performance advantages for these systems. We also discuss a roadmap for next-generation systems that proportionally scale with future networking bandwidth growth rates and employ 3-D chip integration methods for design flexibility and modularity.