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At a conference of Wall Street technology managers in June, IBM introduced System S, a high-performance computer system that is intended to rapidly analyze data as it streams in from many sources, increasing the speed and accuracy of decision making in fields as diverse as security surveillance and Wall Street trading. Stream computing is an effort to deal with two issues: the need for faster data handling and analysis in business and science, and the growing flood of information in digital form, including Web sites, blogs, e-mail, video and news clips, telephone conversations, transaction data and electronic sensors.
In stream computing, advanced software algorithms analyze the data as it streams in. Text, voice and image-recognition technology, for example, can be used to determine that some data is more relevant to a particular problem than others. The priority data is then shuttled off into a program tailored to work on complex, fast-changing problems like tracking an epidemic and predicting its spread, or culling data from electronic sensors in a computer chip plant to quickly correct flaws in manufacturing. Nagui Halim, director of high-performance stream computing at IBM labs, says System S was a new model of computing that offered greater flexibility and speed. "It's a computing system that can morph and adapt to the problems it sees," Halim says. IBM says it can either sell stream computer systems to customers or stream computing as a pay-for-use service over the Internet. |
