IBM Unveils Breakthrough Software and New Services to Exploit Big Data

Commits $100 Million to Massive Scale Analytics Research, petabytes, intelligence

ARMONK, N.Y., - 20 May 2011: As companies seek to gain real-time insight from diverse types of data, IBM (NYSE: IBM) today unveiled new software and services to help clients more effectively gain competitive insight, optimize infrastructure and better manage resources to address Internet-scale data. For the first time, organizations can integrate and analyze tens-of-petabytes of data in its native format and gain critical intelligence in sub-second response times.

IBM also announced a $100 million investment for continued research on technologies and services that will enable clients to manage and exploit data as it continues to grow in diversity, speed and volume. The initiative will focus on research to drive the future of massive scale analytics, through advancing software, systems and services capabilities.

The news comes on the heels of the 2011 IBM Global CIO Study where 83 percent of 3,000 CIOs surveyed said applying analytics and business intelligence to their IT operations is the most important element of their strategic growth plans over the next three to five years.

Today's news further enables Smarter Computing innovations realized by designing systems that incorporate Big Data for better decision making, and optimized systems tuned to the task and managed in a cloud.

According to recent IT industry analyst reports, enterprise data growth over the next five years is estimated to increase by more than 650 percent. Eighty percent of this data is expected to be unstructured.  

The new analytics capabilities pioneered by IBM Research will enable chief information officers (CIOs) to construct specific, fact-based financial and business models for their IT operations. Traditionally, CIOs have had to make decisions about their IT operations without the benefit of tools that can help interpret and model data.

With today's news, IBM is expanding its portfolio and furthering its investments in analytics with:

• New, patented software capabilities to analyze massive volumes of streaming data with sub-millisecond response times and Hadoop-based analytics software to offer scalable storage to handle tens-of-petabytes level data.  These capabilities complement and leverage existing IT infrastructure to support a variety of both structured and unstructured data types.
• 20 new services offerings, featuring patented analytical tools for business and IT professionals to infuse predictive analytics throughout their IT operations. The services enable IT organizations to assess, design and configure their operations to address and take advantage of petabytes of data.

"The volume and velocity of information is generated at a record pace. This is magnified by new forms of data coming from social networking and the explosion of mobile devices," said Steve Mills, Senior Vice President and Group Executive, IBM Software & Systems.  "Through our extensive capabilities in business and technology expertise, IBM is best positioned to help clients not only extract meaningful insight, but enable them respond at the same rate at which the data arrives."

New Services Address Analytics for IT Infrastructure

Leveraging years of intellectual capital in managing data centers and IT departments, as well as over 30 patented technologies from IBM Research, the new IT services feature dozens of analytical tools to help IT professionals use server, storage and networking technologies more efficiently, improving security and insight into planning major IT investments.  Examples of services that help clients with analytics include:

• Cloud Workload Analysis -- The new analysis tool maps your IT workload characteristics and current capabilities to prioritize cloud deployment and migrations plans. This allows IT managers to identify cloud opportunities 90 percent faster to reduce costs.  
• Server and Storage -- New server optimization and analysis tools achieve up to 50 percent reduced transformation costs and up to 80 percent faster implementation time.  New storage services help create self-service to provision explosive growth while reducing architects time by 50 percent.
• Data Center Lifecycle Cost Analysis Tool -- Identifies how to reduce total data center costs by up to 30 percent by assessing total cost plus including environmental impact over a 10 to 20 year life.
• Security Analytic services -- Analytic systems identify known events and automatically handle them; This results in handling of more than 99 percent of critical events without human intervention.

IBM Big Data Software Taps into Hadoop

IBM is making available new InfoSphere BigInsights and Streams software that allows clients to gain fast insight into information flowing in and around their businesses.  The software, which incorporates more than 50 patents, analyzes traditional structured data found in databases along with unstructured data -- such as text, video, audio, images, social media, click streams -- allowing decision makers to act on it at unprecedented speeds.  

BigInsights software is the result of a four-year effort of more than 200 IBM Research scientists and is powered by the open source technology, Apache Hadoop. The software provides a framework for large scale parallel processing and scalable storage for terabyte to petabytes-level data. It incorporates Watson-like technologies, including unstructured text analytics and indexing that allows users to analyze rapidly changing data formats and types on the fly.  

Additional new features include data governance and security, developer tools, and enterprise integration to make it easier for clients to build a new class of Big Data analytics applications. IBM also offers a free downloadable BigInsights Basic Edition for clients to help them explore Big Data integration capabilities.  

Also born at IBM Research, InfoSphere Streams software analyzes data coming into an organization and monitors it for any changes that may signify a new pattern or trend in real time. This capability helps organizations to capture insights and make decisions with more precision, providing an opportunity to respond to events as they happen.

New advancements to Streams software makes it possible to analyze Big Data such as Tweets, blog posts, video frames, EKGs, GPS, and sensor and stock market data up to 350 percent faster than before.  BigInsights complements Streams by applying analytics to the organization's historical data as well as data flowing through Streams. This is an ongoing analytics cycle that becomes increasingly powerful as more data and real-time analytic results are available to be modeled for improvement.

As a long time proponent of open source technology, IBM has chosen the Hadoop project as the cornerstone of its Big Data Strategy. With a continued focus on building advanced analytics solutions for the enterprise, IBM is building upon the power of these open source technologies while adding improved management and security functions, and reliability that businesses demand. Hadoop's ability to process a broad set of information across multiple computing platforms, combined with IBM's analytics capabilities, now makes it possible for clients to tackle today's growing Big Data challenges. IBM's portfolio of Hadoop-based offerings also include IBM Cognos Consumer Insight which integrates social media content with traditional business analytics, and IBM Coremetrics Explore which segments consumer buying patterns and drills down into mobile data. Additionally, Hadoop is the software framework the IBM Watson computing system uses for distributing the workload for processing information, which supports the systems breakthrough ability to understand natural language and provide specific answers to questions at rapid speeds.

University of Ontario Institute of Technology Expands Neo-Natal Research to China

Dr. Carolyn McGregor, Research Chair in Health Informatics at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology has been exploring new approaches for the last 12 years to provide specialists in neonatal intensive care units better ways to spot potentially fatal infections in premature babies.  

Changes in streams of real-time data such as respiration, heart rate and blood pressure are closely monitored in her work and now she is expanding her research to China. "Building upon our work in Canada and Australia, we will apply our research to premature babies at hospitals in China.  With this new additional data, we can compare the differences and similarities of diverse populations of premature babies across continents," said Dr. McGregor. "In comparing populations, we can set the rules to optimize the system to alert us when symptoms occur in real time, which is why having the streaming capability that the IBM platform offers is critical. The types of complexities that we're looking for in patient populations would not be accessible with traditional relational database or analytical approaches."

IBM's Big Data software and services reinforces IBM's analytics initiatives to deliver Watson-like technologies that help clients address industry specific issues. On the heels of The IBMJeopardy! Challenge, in which the IBM Watson system demonstrated a breakthrough capability to understand natural language, advanced analytical capabilities can now be applied on real client challenges ranging from identifying fraud in tax or healthcare systems, to predicting consumer buying behaviors for retail clients.

Over the past five years, IBM has invested more than $14 billion in 24 analytics acquisitions. Today, more than 8,000 IBM business consultants are dedicated to analytics and over 200 mathematicians are developing breakthrough algorithms inside IBM Research. IBM holds more than 22,000 active U.S. patents related to data and information management.

For more information on IBM Big Data initiatives, visit: www.ibm.com/bigdata.

For more information on IBM's full set of new analytics services, visit: www.ibm.com/services/it-insight.

Contributed by Bob Johnson's Computer Stuff

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IBM Opens New Missouri Facility to Deliver Technology Services

Hiring Under Way in Response to Client Demand

COLUMBIA, Mo., - 20 May 2011: At a ribbon-cutting ceremony today officiated by Missouri Governor Jay Nixon, IBM (NYSE: IBM) executives and leaders of Missouri's business and governmental communities announced that a new IBM technology service delivery center is now operational and the centerpiece of the state's economic development initiative in Columbia.  

IBM has committed to create up to 800 new locally based jobs by the end of 2012 as part of its strategy to deliver high-quality, competitive technology services globally. The Columbia opening comes 21 months after IBM opened a similar facility in 2009 in Dubuque, Iowa, and hired more than 1,000 technical professionals to perform the same type of work.

"Creating high-quality, career-supporting jobs is the top priority of my administration, and IBM's locating a new technology delivery center in mid-Missouri is a tremendous win for our state economy," said Governor Jay Nixon. "The creation of 800 new high-tech jobs is another indication of the strength of our rebounding economy, which created nearly 27,000 new jobs statewide in just the past two months while our unemployment rate dropped to its lowest figure in two full years."

The opening of IBM's technology services delivery center in Columbia is a milestone in the ongoing growth of the Midwestern city, Missouri's fifth largest with a population of 108,500 according to the 2010 U.S. census. Columbia is consistently listed among the top cities in the United States by national magazines and organizations. Its excellent public school system, access to quality health care and central location have earned it a position as one of the top places to live and conduct business.

The new service delivery center will primarily support IBM's U.S. information technology (IT) services clients, providing server systems operations, project management and security services, including maintenance and monitoring of computer hardware and software systems. Employees will manage the servers and storage systems that are critical for assuring optimal information technology performance for IBM's clients.

"Today is a great day for our community, the region, and the state of Missouri," said Columbia Mayor Bob McDavid.  "We wholeheartedly welcome IBM and its employees to our community and look forward to a long-term, mutually beneficial relationship.  We are honored that IBM saw the potential in our city and workforce and chose to make this investment."

IBM will work with the University of Missouri and many of the other colleges and schools that offer IT education in the Columbia region to recruit and train employees, as well as hire experienced professionals.

"The opening of the IBM Services Delivery Center in Columbia will further strengthen the ties between our two institutions, and provide our graduates with access to highly skilled positions with a world class employer right here in our own backyard," said Brady Deaton, Chancellor, University of Missouri. "The University of Missouri and IBM have long enjoyed a strong and mutually beneficial relationship in terms of recruitment and hiring, joint research, and development of curricula to prepare students for the jobs of the future."

In addition, IBM will look for opportunities to partner with the schools to enhance their curricula to better prepare students for opportunities in the IT industry, including the types of roles found at IBM.

"IBM's technology services clients not only need a partner to manage their technology infrastructure, but one that can help them to solve global business challenges and uncover new opportunities for growth," said Tim Shaughnessy, senior vice president, IBM Services Delivery. "The center here in Columbia will employ the type of professional who can adapt to change, handle complexity and has the necessary analytical and technical proficiency to help our clients accomplish their goals by delivering high-value, quality information technology services.  We are delighted to partner with the city of Columbia and the state of Missouri, and we look forward to a successful, enduring relationship."

Together the two facilities in Dubuque and Columbia will ultimately employ more than 2,000 professionals in the technology and engineering services industry.  The opening of the Columbia center marks an ongoing commitment by IBM to invest and develop 21st century skills-based economic drivers where there is a nexus of talent, ready academic resources and a strong government partnership. From 2002 through 2009, for example, IBM invested over $13 billion in capital expenditures in the U.S. including about $1 billion in Burlington, Vermont, and $5 billion in East Fishkill, New York, to build microchip fabrication facilities. That investment has contributed to the development in New York of the Albany Nanotech Center as an economic magnet for associated industries.

In May 2010, IBM announced the signing of a 10-year lease, with optional extension years, to occupy and renovate a building on LeMone Industrial Boulevard.  The building has been updated with the goal of achieving Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification. LEED is a third-party certification program and the nationally accepted benchmark for the design, construction and operation of high-performance "green" buildings. The city of Columbia and IBM are also working together to incorporate the new facility into Columbia's Sustainable City program, which includes building bike paths to connect the facility with downtown and planting new trees and bushes along and around LeMone Industrial Boulevard.

The new center is part of an extensive network of IBM service delivery centers in more than 20 countries, with multiple sites in many of those countries that provide IT services to IBM clients around the world.

Contributed by Bob Johnson's Computer Stuff

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'Jeopardy!' Contestants Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter Face Off Against Watson, the Super Computer from IBM

It will be a battle fit for the record books, one that will go down in history alongside Gettysburg and World War II. Only this one will not be fought with swords, guns or armies, but with little clickers and incredible knowledge. That's right, I am talking about the epic showdown set to take place on Jeopardy! this coming Monday which pits two of the show's biggest all-time winners, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, against Watson, a computer designed by IBM.

If you are not familiar with the popular game show that tests contestants' knowledge in a wide range of categories, then you will not know who Ken Jennings or Brad Rutter are. To put it simply, Jennings won a grand total of $3,022,700 on the show coming in second only to Brad Rutter who took home a total of $3,255,102. Needless to say, these gentlemen are extremely smart and ready to test their wits against the ultimate competitor, technology.

According to Stephen Baker, author of Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything, "The computer is fast on the buzzer, and if it's given certain specialties - it's good on facts about facts it can find and nail down - it could win. But humans are better with complex English, puns, nuances, so..."

This challenge was initiated by IBM after its scientists worked on Watson for four years. The outcome has already been determined as the show does not air live, but it is a secret. The episodes were taped on January 14th, 2011 and are set to air on Monday, February 14th, 2011 and conclude on Wednesday, February 16th, 2011. Alex Trebek, the host of Jeopardy! since 1984, isn't budging on giving away the result either.

"I think the guys have a slight edge on knowledge because their memories are good," says Trebek. "In terms of speed, it's no contest. Watson has the edge there. But it'll all come down to luck." Trebek also added that Watson could not see or hear him "so it was pointless to comment in his direction!"

Executive Producer of Jeopardy! Harry Friedman noted that putting the show together was definitely a challenge. Nobody has every done this before and the closest thing to be done like this was when chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov took on an IBM computer known as Deep Blue. He lost. According to Friedman, "Producing for people and with people is one thing, but dealing with a computer was another."

Friedman sees the competition as a "fascinating exhibition of technology" and not a tournament or a competition. "It is to be judged for what technology can do," he says. However, don't tell that to Jennings or Rutter. Jennings stated that he was spooked by the setting, which took place inside the labs of IBM. "No one was cheering for me. It was at their (IBM's) home arena. It was an away game for humanity."

Rutter, who has won the highest accumulative amount on Jeopardy! ever, says that he does not think humans are becoming outdated and that he enjoyed being a "guinea pig" playing against a computer. According to Rutter, "People watch the show to see the contestants and how they react. Watson will never jump up and down when he gets it right."

The contest is going to air this coming Monday, Feruary 14th, 2011. Check your local listings so you can tune in and see who is smarter, man or machine.

Source: USA Today - 'Jeopardy!' champs compete against computer

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Breakthrough by IBM May Bring Us Exascale Supercomputers

If you are one of the people out there that doesn't think that a supercomputer seems good enough, then you probably work at IBM. Researchers at IBM have just made a breakthrough in using light pulses to help accelerate the transfer of data between chips. If this works out like the people at IBM think it will, then it could quite possibly increase supercomputer performance by more than a thousand times.

This technology, dubbed CMOS Integrated Silicon Nanophotonics (I feel smarter already), integrates optical modules as well as electrical modules on a single piece of silicon. This allows electrical signals created at the transistor level to be transformed into light pulses, seemingly allowing chips to communicate faster according to IBM silicon photonics research scientist Will Green.

IBM believes that this new technology will lead to massive advances in supercomputer power. The fastest supercomputers we have around today max out at nearly 2 petaflops which, for us lay people, registers into two thousand trillion calculations per second. The photonics technology could increase this number to a staggering trillion million calculations per second. Yeah, a MILLION TRILLION calculations per second, otherwise known as an exaflop. This would help IBM achieve their goal of building an exascale computer by the year 2020.

According to Green, "In an exascale system, interconnects have to be able to push exabytes per second across the network. This is an interesting milestone for system builders who are looking at building exascale systems in 10 years."

The possibility of integrating multiple photonics modules onto a single substrate or onto a motherboard is here, according to Green. Newer supercomputers already use optical technology for chips in order to communicate. However, this usually occurs at the rack level and mostly over a single wavelength. This breakthrough will allow optical communication simultaneously at multiple wavelengths.

The good thing about this technology is that it can be manufactured on a standard chip production line. Another benefit is that it also needs no special tools, making it extremely cost-effective. The current demonstration used a 130-nanometer CMOS manufacturing node. However, IBM plans on pursuing integration into "deeply scaled sub-100 nanometer CMOS processes," according to Green.

The technology aims to replace copper wires. As you know, copper wires are widely used today for data transfer between chips. Optics can get a speed increase for distances as short as a few centimeters to as long as a few miles and even consumes less power. Eventually, IBM hopes to use optics for on-chip communication between transistors as well. According to Green, "There is a vision for the chip level, but that is not what we are claiming today."

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IBM Computer is Like a Human Brain...Sort of

At the Supercomputing Show in Portland, Oregon, IBM researchers announced that they are much closer to making a computer that can simulate the human brain. According to the researchers, they've reached a couple of major milestones in the project. One is performing the first real-time cortical simulation of the brain that goes beyond that of a cortex. The other is the development of an algorithm that maps the connections between cortical and subcortical areas in the brain, using IBM's Blue Gene super computing architecture.

The IBM researchers, working in collaboration with scientists from Stanford, the University of Wisconsin, Cornell, Columbia University Medical Center, and the University of California at Merced, would like to ultimately make a computer that can evaluate and act on data just like a human brain. The computer would also use similar amounts of space and energy as our brains do.

"Learning from the brain is an attractive way to overcome power and density challenges faced in computing today. As the digital and physical worlds continue to merge and computing becomes more embedded in the fabric of our daily lives, it's imperative that we create a more intelligent computing system that can help us make sense of the vast amount of information that's increasingly available to us, much the way our brains can quickly interpret and act on complex tasks," said Josephine Cheng, a Fellow and lab director of IBM Research-Almaden.

The research is part of a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) initiative called Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Eletronics (SYNAPSE). DARPA recently awarded the researchers $16.1 million for Phase 1 of the project. The cortical simulator was run on the Dawn Blue Gene/P supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The supercomputer has 144TB of memory and 147,456 processors. The algorithm, which is called BlueMatter, allows scientists to experiment with mathematical hypotheses about how brain structure affects function when combined with the cortical simulator.

The researched say that as the amount of critical data and information continues to rapidly grow, businesses will have to find ways to adapt and make quick decisions. This "brain-like" computer will pull together information to help businesses come up with accurate, fast, and logical responses to data they receive.

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IBM Memory Faster and Cheaper

Memory is one of the biggest things people have to deal with in their computers. It seems everytime you turn around you are needing to upgrade your memory because you ran out or your computer crashed. This is a particular problem due to the price of some memory.

But the new memory from IBM plans to change everything we know about memory. According to England's university of Leeds physicist Christopher Marrow, "Racetrack memory will be a vast improvement over today's leading computer memory technology - flash and hard disk - which each have serious limitations." IBM shows it's new Racetrack memory, as it has been named, has been more reliable in recent tests than hard disks which hopefully will make frequent computer crashes obsolete.

Racetrack is also said to be cheaper than the current prices for hard disk memory. According to Marrows, "This technology will have the best of both worlds - cheap nano-size with huge memory in 3G phones, MP3 players, camcorders, and other devices. But more importantly there will be more sites that will be able to give away storage for free like YouTube and Gmail."

The main point of racetrack is speed, hence the name, and reliability. In hard disks, a motor-operated head, like the ones seen in record players, has to move to the data to read it. Data stored on the Racetrack is moved around on a wire which is pushed by spiraling magnetics. The moving parts in the hard disk makes it very susceptible to crashing. "Hard disks are so good because they are so cheap. But they are bad because of the moving parts." says Marrows.

The other memory device, flash memory, was created in 1980 by Toshiba. But, like hard disks, flash memory has its own problems as well. On the good side, flash memory has no moving parts and is a solid-state storage device. This makes it more reliable and faster than disks. However, on the flip side flash memory has a limited number of erase-write cycles it can perform before the memory capacity begins to deteriorate.

The thing for Racetrack is to have the speed and durability of flash memory combined with the hard disk affordability. According to Stuart Parkin, IBM fellow and inventor of Racetrack, "Racetrack will have cheap memory with the possibility of being one million times faster than hard disks without the risk of wearing out." Unlike hard disks, there is no need to search for information. According to Parkin, this will allow computers to boot up almost instantly.

And, like everything else in the world, Racetrack memory will use less energy making it green. Parkin says, 'The tremendous amount of storage, faster performance, and reduced energy requirements make it a nice green and smart technology."

One of the biggest, and smartest, innovations of Racetrack is that it is designed vertically which allows it to take up less room than the current memory. This will make it extremely less expensive due to the fact that the price of a chip is based on the space it uses. This design makes Racetrack the first 3-D memory allowing it to obtain more bits per transistor. According to Parkin, "This will allow us to take a chip and increase the transistor size 10 to 100 times, breaking Moore's Law." Moore's Law was founded by Gordon E. Moore, co-founder of Intel. In 1965, Moore observed that the number of transistors per square inch on a circuit board will double every 18 months.

Some experts believe that Moore's law will hold true for another couple of decades. However, Parkin is hoping that his Racetrack will quash that ide in about 5 to 7 years. It is at this point Parkin hopes the Racetrack memory will be fully operational and available. Zeljko Zilic, associate professor of the Department of Electrical Computer Engineering at Montreal's McGill University, says that, "As technology enabler, racetrack fits within the 'universal memory' concept, where one type of memory could be used across the full spectrum, replacing the need for multiple types of internal memory. Currently, flash memory comes closest to the ideal, but disadvantages of flash will become more and more apparent."

The goal of IBM is not, in any way, to improve current technology. Their goal is to absolutely replace it all together. Racetrack has the potential to replace both hard disk and flash," Parkin says. "Our goal is to replace all flash memory as it will get rid of the concept of trading performance for cost."

While there are still a few years before Racetrack comes out, people are already waiting with high anticipation. The thought of completely replacing the memory system we have used for the past 60 years is no small feat. But with the brains at IBM, we can bet that they will give it their all to give us the best quality tehy can.

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