Jim Smith, General Partner, Mohr Davidow Ventures

By Jim Smith

Take a second to think about how much of our daily activity takes place online. And I don’t just mean at work. In 2012, $225 billion of retail purchases happened virtually. In the U.S., 55 percent of us book worldwide travel solely through the Internet. Even our personal relationships, from organizing social activities to calling our relatives across the country and overseas, are maintained on the web. The rise of the Internet Revolution has had such a profound impact on our lives that most of us can’t even imagine how the world would revolve without it.

Many of the activities we perform online – whether staying on top of the 24-hour news cycle or managing our bank accounts – are made possible by the Internet’s open architecture. The Internet Revolution was catalyzed by the establishing and adopting of open standards. Linux, Apache, PHP: these are just a few examples of standards that made it possible for us to do almost anything online.

Cloud computing is now at this same inflection point. In Silicon Valley and other hotbeds of innovation, the idea of an open-architecture cloud is becoming a reality. This will be transformational on a level equal to that of the Internet.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Open cloud computing will provide the infrastructure that supports our increasingly interconnected world. And as collaboratively driven technologies such as OpenStack, Quantum, Ceph and Swift establish open standards in the cloud, the pace of technology innovation will become even more rapid. These standards will unlock boundless opportunities for startup and large companies alike, as well as the individuals they serve.

So get ready. Once this revolution ignites, things that seem futuristic today will rapidly move from theory to reality – dramatically impacting our daily lives. The open cloud will serve as the catalyst for many things, big and small, that today may seem impractical or unimaginable, but tomorrow will be pervasive.

Take, for example, the sensor in the tire of your car. Today, it tells you if the tire needs air. Tomorrow? Powered by open cloud computing, that sensor will be able to not only tell you that the tire is going flat, but will check your dealership’s inventory. The dealership may, in turn, talk to the smartphone connected to your car, checking your calendar to install a replacement. This is only the start of what’s possible once as the open cloud lifts off.

Open Standards enable essential powerful computing capabilities at entrepreneur friendly cost points, and reduce the high licensing and operating expenses that closed software and hardware solutions impose. The open cloud provides startups the reach, speed, and scale that support entrepreneurial creativity and agility. It is the canvas for developing the revolutionary mobile, social and big data technologies that will change our world.

Next generation cloud standards are breaking the chains of high-cost, difficult-to-use networking, database and storage technologies. They provide the framework for entrepreneurs to build analytic platforms that will enable vastly more effective and personalized healthcare, widespread demand response systems that will lower energy consumption, and advanced and broadly adopted video communications that will more tightly connect us with friends and family.

Startups not only use open technologies to redefine the world of what is possible, but also serve as the incubators of new technologies that enable the next wave of startups. As open standards in the cloud take hold, a tremendous stream of innovation is gathering speed. This will not only ignite future technology waves, but will transform daily lives the world over.

Technorati Tags: Big Data, cloud computing, IBM SmartCloud, IBM Smarter Planet, innovation, Open Standards, OpenStack, Smarter Cloud

IBM CEO Ginni Rometty

In these early days of the 21^st century, Big Data, analytics, cloud, mobile and social technologies are transforming our world.  This new era of computing provides the instrumentation, interconnection and intelligence that make it possible to build a smarter planet. But, in order to do so, countries, cities, corporations and individuals need to rethink how they go about achieving their goals. Watch this video of IBM CEO Ginni Rometty laying out her vision of the path forward at the Council on Foreign Relations–and her Q&A session with the audience. Join the conversation here and on Twitter at #IBM and #CFRlive. Here’s the speech.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Join us tomorrow to discuss how enterprises can take advantage of today’s cutting-edge technologies to become more competitive. IBM social business leader Jen Okimoto will lead a Smarter Friday chat on IBM’s People for a Smarter Planet Facebook page from 8:00 AM-2:00 PM ET. IBM social business evangelist Sandy Carter will host a #P4SPchat from 12:00 PM-1:00 PM ET on Twitter.

Technorati Tags: Council on Foreign Relations, Ginni Rometty

By Richard Silberman, Writer/Researcher, IBM Communications

During the past year, we’ve profiled nine exceptional “People for a Smarter Planet” who exemplify the spirit of change, innovation, creativity and curiosity that lie at the core of building a smarter planet. They are inventors and researchers, academics and executives, thought leaders, dreamers, risk-takers, pioneers.

These individuals come from a wide range of fields and possess an array of interests and expertise. What they all have in common is a passion for their work and a commitment to make the world a better place.

They include Ruhong Zhou, whose avian flu research may help prevent a global pandemic; Dave Bartlett, IBM’s smarter buildings guru; Bill Reichert, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist with novel advice for entrepreneurs; and sustainability expert Sarah Slaughter.

If you haven’t met them yet, here are nine People for a Smarter Planet you should know.

Technorati Tags: business analytics, cloud, IBM Research, IBM Smarter Planet, innovation, smarter analytics, Smarter Industries, Smarter People

Dr. Lubomyr Romankiw, IBM Fellow in Electrochemical Technology, Micromagnetics and Microfabrication

By Richard Silberman, Writer/Researcher, IBM Communications

Without Lubomyr Romankiw, building a smarter planet would be much more difficult, if not impossible. Personal computers, smart phones, digital cameras and DVRs may have taken much longer to become a reality. ATMs, the Internet, Blue Gene and cloud computing might still be far off fantasies.

The world as we know and enjoy it today – with its ubiquitous computers and data-storing devices – is almost unimaginable without the magnetic thin-film disk storage technology and the read-and-write magnetic head that Dr. Romankiw and Dr. David A. Thompson invented at IBM 40 years ago.

The thin-film magnetic recording head is the tiny component that reads and writes data in virtually every disk-based storage device made since 1979. Before Dr. Romankiw’s inventions of thin-film heads and the processing technology to fabricate them, data storage for even the most cutting-edge computers was cumbersome, slow and expensive.

Dr. Romankiw’s innovations dramatically increased storage density and speed, shrunk disk size, reduced costs — and enabled the modern digital information age. To this day, Dr. Romankiw’s basic patents on structure and process are used in virtually every disk drive made.

For his groundbreaking inventions, Dr. Romankiw, an IBM Fellow, was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in May, joining the ranks of Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell and the Wright brothers. A huge honor, he acknowledges, but for Dr. Romankiw, there’s no looking back and resting on laurels — only looking forward.

At 81, as he celebrates 50 years with IBM this month, Dr. Romankiw still comes to work daily, full of ideas and enthusiasm, often working through the night into the next morning.

“I have no intention of slowing down as long as my mind works and I am able to come up with good ideas“, Dr. Romankiw said. “When I come across a new problem, I can’t help but think, ‘How are we going to solve that?’”

Click here to view the embedded video.

A quantum leap in computer design

When Dr. Romankiw joined IBM in 1962, the state-of-the-art in computing was the IBM 305 RAMAC — the first commercial computer with a hard disk drive. It contained 50 disks that were 24 inches each in diameter; the recording heads were made by manually winding thin copper wire around ferrite cores; and the entire system filled a small room.

IBM and other companies were eager to replace this technology with something smaller, cheaper, faster and easily manufactured. While most researchers trying to build magnetic heads tried to extend the vacuum technology being developed at the time to create silicon semiconductors, Dr. Romankiw had his own ideas about how to improve magnetic storage — and IBM let him run with it.

Breaking with convention, Dr. Romankiw believed that electroplating — the technique of coating the surface of a conducting material with a thin film of metal — held the key to shrinking magnetic heads and revolutionizing disk storage. Amidst much skepticism, he invented electroplating processes, unique plating tools and materials that yielded the necessary magnetic properties to create a tiny, powerful read/write head.

“I was not a trained electrochemist so I didn’t know that many of these things that I was doing were not supposed to work,” Dr. Romankiw said. “So I had the advantage of not being overburdened by knowledge!”

Dr. Romankiw began work on his thin-film technology in the late 1960s and patented his breakthrough device – the integrated magnetoresistive read and inductive write head – in 1975. The new head incorporated the work of his colleague Dr. David Thompson, who was also inducted into the Inventors Hall of Fame in May.

The first commercial thin-film head appeared in 1979 in the IBM 3380 disk storage device, which was a fraction of the size of the IBM 305 RAMAC. The revolutionary new head, with its ability to store and retrieve massive amounts of data at lightning speed, was quickly adopted across the computing industry.

68 patents, 150 inventions, 200 scientific papers…and counting

The beauty of Dr. Romankiw’s thin-film head is that it enables a huge increase in the amount of data that can be stored on magnetic disks, even as the size of those disks is rapidly shrinking. By making data storage compact and affordable, Dr. Romankiw’s tiny recording head ushered in a steady miniaturization of magnetic storage devices that continues to this day.

Through years of incremental advances, today’s disks are now 2.5 inches in diameter and contain up to one million times more information than the 24 inch disk of decades ago. Data storage density has soared from 10 megabytes per square inch of disk surface when IBM introduced the thin-film head to a whopping 400 gigabyes per square inch today. The cost of data storage has dropped from about $500,000 per gigabyte in 1979 to less than 25 cents today.

While solid state technology has replaced disk drives in many small devices, such as phones and cameras, the thin-film head is still essential to most desktops and laptops as well as large computers. Without the thin-film head, data-intensive endeavors from genetic engineering to space exploration to high-speed stock trading would be virtually impossible.

No matter who the manufacturer is, all heads used in computers today still use the same basic design and fabrication processes developed by Dr. Romankiw and his colleagues at IBM.

“If people ask me how they can identify my work when they use their computer, I have a very simple answer,” Dr. Romankiw said. “The minute you hit the key once and get a picture on your screen, seven patents that went into building the thin-film head are already working for you. The same goes every time you hit a key to write something.”

Dr. Romankiw has 68 patents to his name, about 150 published inventions, more than 200 scientific papers and close to 400 oral presentations. He has received many honors over the years including the prestigious Perkin Medal and, most recently, the University of Alberta Distinguished Alumni Award.

Yet you’ll never find him dwelling on his accomplishments.

“Whatever I invented in the past is the past. It’s over,” Dr. Romankiw said. “Yes, I’m proud of what I did, but I don’t blast my horn about it. I’ve done it and it works. I’m glad that everybody has use for it and I’m working now on something else.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Video by University of Alberta

Fleeing the Soviets, helping the scouts, changing the world

Dr. Romankiw started inventing around age 11 as a boy in Ukraine, where he would collect machine gun shells off the ground and use the gunpowder to make small straw “rockets” that he’d fly around his house.

In 1944, when he was 13 years old, Dr. Romankiw and his family fled Ukraine to escape the Soviets, first moving to Austria, then West Germany and finally settling in Edmonton, Alberta, where he finished high school and studied chemical engineering at the University of Alberta. He went on to get his Ph.D. at MIT and then took a job at IBM, where he has worked ever since.

Besides inventing, Dr. Romankiw’s other passion is the Ukrainian Scouts, where he has served as chief scout for the organization since being elected in 1997. Dr. Romankiw was a scout as a boy and today he helps raise funds, donates money and takes scouts from Ukraine to jamborees around the world.

“Some of these kids have now grown and are becoming capable leaders in local and provincial government and they’re already making a difference,” Dr. Romankiw said. “So that’s my contribution to making Ukraine, my country of birth, more democratic and more like the rest of the world.”

Whether inventing, or nurturing scouts, Dr. Romankiw has devoted his life to improving lives. His latest focus, at age 81, is no less ambitious than the work he did over 40 years ago.

In fact, today Dr. Romankiw is extending many of the same electroplating innovations from his thin-film magnetic head breakthrough to create better solar panels. He is also developing a way to put inductors directly on top of computer chips in order to regulate and supply power separately to different parts of the chip and use less energy.

“We’re going to need many ways to create new energy in the years ahead to meet the world’s exploding use of technology as populations grow, which is why these two projects are my passions right now,” Dr. Romankiw said.

Given all his accomplishments and accolades during a long and brilliant career, one can’t help but ask, “Why not retire?”

“I like the challenges,” Dr. Romankiw said. “Some people spend days on end doing jigsaw puzzles. To me, what I do is jigsaw puzzles. I am happy when I accomplish something and get it to work. Give me more challenges!”

Technorati Tags: data storage, electroplating, IBM 305 Ramac, IBM 3380, IBM Fellow, Lubomyr Romankiw, National Inventors Hall of Fame, Thin film head, Ukrainian Scouts, University of Alberta

Bernard Meyerson, Chief Innovation Officer, IBM

By Bernard Meyerson

It’s amazing when you look back over the 60+ years of the computing revolution and see how far we have come in such a relatively short time. The first electronic programmable computers, built in the 1940s, were essentially really fast electronic calculators. Then came the mainframe, the PC, the Internet and social networking. Today, we’re entering the era of cognitive computing–machines that help us think.

IBM’s Watson marks a turning point.  The former Jeopardy! TV quiz show champ is now reading millions of pages of medical text in preparation for going to work in healthcare. But while Watson can understand all manner of things and learns from its interactions with data and humans, it is just a first step into a new era of computing that’s going to produce machines that are as distinct from today’s computers as those computers are from the mechanical tabulating devices that preceded them. A host of technologies are coming that will help us overcome our limitations and will transform the way we interact with machines and with each other.

One of the most intriguing aspects of this shift is our ability to give machines some of the capabilities of the right side of the human brain. New technologies make it possible for machines to mimic and augment the senses. Today, we see the beginnings of sensing machines in self-parking cars and biometric security–and the future is wide open. This year, we focused the IBM Next 5 in 5, our 2012 forecast of inventions that will change your world in the next five years, on how computers will mimic the senses:

Touch:        You will be able to reach out and touch through your phone
Sight:          A pixel will be worth a thousand words
Hearing:     Computers will hear what matters
Taste:          Digital taste buds will help you to eat healthier
Smell:          Computers will have a sense of smell

Join the Twitter conversation at #ibm5in5. Click here to vote on the coolest predictions, and check back on the blog Dec. 21 for the results.

Click here to view the embedded video.

These five predictions show how cognitive technologies can improve our lives, and they’re windows into a much bigger landscape –the coming era of cognitive systems. The world is tremendously complex. We face challenges in deciphering everything from the science governing tiny bits of matter to the functioning of the human body to the way cities operate to how weather systems develop. Gradually, over time, computers have helped us understand better how the world works. But, today, a convergence of new technologies is making it possible for people to comprehend things much more deeply than ever before, and, as a result, to make better decisions.

At IBM, we have been talking about these new capabilities for the past four years under the rubric of our Smarter Planet agenda. We believe that the combination of instrumentation, interconnectivity and computing intelligence makes it possible to  manage the natural and human systems of the world more efficiently and effectively. Well, think of the coming era of cognitive systems as the Smarter Planet agenda on steroids.

In the coming years, computers will become even more adept at dealing with complexity. Rather than depending on humans to write software programs that tell them what to do, they will program themselves so they can adapt to changing realities and expectations. They’ll learn by interacting with data in all of its forms–numbers, text, video, etc. And, increasingly, they’ll be designed so they think more like the humans.

Today, if you put a robotic track inspector in a railroad tunnel and equipped it with a video camera, it would not know what to make of an oncoming train. But what if you enabled it to sense things more like  humans do–not just vision from the video camera but the ability to detect the rumble of the train and the whoosh of air? And what if you enabled it to draw inferences from the evidence that it observes, hears and feels? That would be one smart computer–a machine that would be able to get out of the way before the train smashed into it.

IBM Research is taking the lead in producing some of the scientific advances that will enable the big shift to cognitive computing. A team at our lab in San Jose, Calif.,  for instance, is designing a chip that’s based on the architecture of the brain that could become the brains of the railroad robot. The goal is to create a system that analyzes complex data from multiple senses at once, but also dynamically rewires itself as it interacts with its environment–all the while rivaling the brain’s compact size and low energy usage. Our lead researcher on the project, Dharmendra Modha, envisions being able to package the computational power of a human brain in a container the size of a shoe box.

But the point isn’t to replicate human brains. We humans are no slouches when it comes to procreation. And this isn’t about replacing human thinking with machine thinking. Once again; not necessary. Rather, in the era of cognitive systems, humans and machines will collaborate to produce better results–each bringing their own superior skills to the partnership. The machines will be more rational and analytic. We’ll provide the judgment, empathy, morale compass and creativity.

Indeed, in my view, cognitive systems will help us overcome the “bandwidth” limits of the individual human.

–Limits to our ability to deal with complexity. We have difficulty processing large amounts of information that comes at us rapidly. We also have problems understanding the interactions of the elements of large systems–such as all of the moving parts in the global economy. With cognitive computing, we will be able to harvest insights from huge quantities of data, understand complex situations, make accurate predictions about the future, and anticipate the unintended consequences of actions.

–Limits to our expertise. This is especially important when we’re trying to address problems that cut across intellectual and industrial domains. With the help of cognitive systems, we will be able to see the big picture and make better decisions. These systems can learn and tell us things we didn’t even ask for.

–Limits to our objectivity. We all possess biases based on our personal experiences, our egos and emotions, and our intuition about what works and what doesn’t. Cognitive systems can help remove our blinders and make it possible for us to have clearer understandings of the situations we’re in.

–Limits to our senses. We can only take in and make sense of so much stuff. With cognitive systems, computer sensors teamed with analytics engines will vastly extend our ability to gather and process sense-based information.

I don’t believe that cognitive systems will usurp the role of human thinkers. Rather, they’ll make us more capable and more successful–and, hopefully, better stewards of the planet.

Technorati Tags: AI, cognitive computing, machine learning

John Potter, Vice President, Hosting, Applications and Cloud Solutions, AT&T Business Solutions

By John Potter

Technorati Tags: cloud, cloud network, cloudcomputing, IBM, Smarter Planet, urban infrastructure, virtual private network

By Harry Kolar,  IBM Distinguished Engineer and Sensor-Based Solutions

The rough seas off the coast of Ireland, where the North Atlantic can churn waves more than 15 meters high, are home to some of the largest concentrations of wave energy in the world. This turbulent seascape has for centuries served as both a sanctuary for marine life and a source of commerce and sustenance for the people of Ireland and Europe.

Now the waters of Galway Bay are providing something new: information.

After more than 18 months of design, development and research, the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland (SEAI) in association with IBM and the Marine Institute of Ireland last month turned on a massive data collection system that will capture and analyze – in real-time – the under water noise levels of the bay.

Initially, the system will capture and analyze the ambient noise of the ocean to establish a baseline of acoustics including natural and anthropogenic (man-made) sound sources including vessel traffic. But the ultimate goal is to capture and analyze the sounds and vibrations of hulking wave energy conversion machines that have begun bobbing along off the coast and help determine what, if any impact the sound waves from those devices could have on marine life – but especially highly sensitive dolphin, porpoise, and whale populations.

This year-long project is an offshoot of an effort launched in 2009 in Galway Bay by IBM and SEAI, called SmartBay. While much has been written about both of these projects, little has been said about the technology behind them. The “smarts,” if you will, of the SmartBay.

To pull off this latest project, IBM situated a large monitoring buoy just under 2 km from the southern shore of Galway Bay and outfitted it with two underwater sensors: a hydrophone and a particle velocity sensor. These sensors capture the underwater sound waves and transmit them wirelessly at about 15M bps via TCP/IP continuously – day and night – to a receiving system on the shore. That system has a dedicated high speed connection to an IBM data center in Dublin where a grid of four IBM System x3650 M2 servers processes the incoming data. As the information is analyzed it is stored on more than 36TB of storage between an IBM System Storage N3400 with 12 1TB drives, and IBM System Storage EXN3000 SAS/SATA Expansion system with 24 1TB drives.

IBM is in the process of developing software that will enable the existing systems to support and manage data coming in from an array of additional sensors, which will dramatically increase the scope of the test site. (The existing hydrophone can pick up acoustics from miles away.)

That’s smarter computing – applying the most strategic and efficient technology to achieve clearly defined business goals. In this case: determining the impact of wave energy machines on marine life.

But it’s also a terrific example of how IBM and partners are on the point for building the Smarter Planet. For example, the methods we’re applying in Galway Bay are piquing the interest of water stewards around the globe, many of whom are facing mounting interest from alternative energy companies looking to deploy wave energy conversion systems. It’s also attracting attention from offshore oil and gas industry leaders, who are working to monitor and minimize the environmental impact of their operations. Even companies involved in land-locked fossil fuel exploration projects are interested in the Galway Bay work.

The growing interest is a testament to an aspiration and a willingness to apply the right technologies, strategically, to achieve goals and solve problems. It’s what the Smarter Planet is all about.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Technorati Tags: galway bay, IBM, ireland

Brazil, Russia, India, China, Turkey, South Africa and Mexico are the fastest growing markets for computer equipment, making up 14% of the global IT market. The regions increasing their IT purchases the most are the Middle East, Eastern Europe and Africa, according to Forrester Research. A growing list of companies in these emerging economies is relying on the IBM System z mainframe to build their infrastructures.

The Ministry of Senegal brought all of its import and export processes from across the country on-line with System z, and is now recovering 30% of Gross National Product, which amounts to two billion Senegalese francs in customs revenue every day. In the process, the Ministry increased the performance of its systems by 70%, reduced power consumption by 20% and cut operating costs by 30%.

Customs officers in Senegal and their partners now have real-time access to information across all of the country’s border checkpoints. They can check to see if the correct duty has been paid on shipments of goods coming through the country’s main border checkpoints This is a vast improvement over the Ministry’s previous system, which was limited to two border checkpoints. The Ministry of Senegal is using technology to apply critical information to boost the country’s economic growth.

My company, CFAO, also worked with the government in Cameroon to help them build their infrastructure on the mainframe. In Cameroon, the Cameroon Ministry of Finance is using a System z mainframe to help with smarter banking and modernize the payroll processes for government employees in the country. The new system is helping to increase the security of the Ministry’s payroll system and improve the efficiency of processes such as generating pay slips.

Mainframes provide enterprise clients in growth markets with an efficient platform for growth as they transform their businesses to become smarter in their industry. CFAO’s System z business in Africa has grown 15% over the last three years. And IBM’s System z revenue in growth markets was up 11% year to year in the second quarter of 2012, per IBM earnings.

Today, IBM announced a new mainframe that has been built with features that will appeal to clients in growth markets, such as the capability to run without a raised datacenter floor. IBM has been making changes over the last five generations of mainframes to enable clients to do this.

The new family of mainframes will also allow enterprises in growth markets to grow their business by 50 percent without increasing their energy usage, IT investment or system size.

CFAO expects the new mainframe will allow us to help more clients in Africa operate smarter to grow their economies and better serve citizens by more effectively making use of available data.

CFAO Technologies is an IBM Business Partner in West Africa.

Technorati Tags: africa, IBM, mainframe, zSeries

If you own a car in North America, you’re told to change the oil every 3,700 miles or six months. This applies whether you are living in Florida, driving peacefully to work, or living in Minnesota with frequent subzero temperatures in the winter. In Scandanavia, where I live, we change the oil in our vehicles less frequently because of concern about the environment.

But no matter what schedule you use, the point is that old-fashioned service manuals are not smart. Cars are used in different ways, and should therefore be serviced in different ways. And the same goes for any type of machinery.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Just because machines start out the same way doesn’t mean we should service them the same way. To determine how often we get vehicles serviced, we need to consider the environment in which the machines operate, and how they are being used. The trick, off course, is to figure out just that: where and how are they being used?

It all starts with collecting data. Sensors are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Using heat cameras, we can detect wear inside a ball bearing. Microphones can help us detect the slightest change in frequency of a motor and with accelerometers, which are small sensors that measure acceleration, we can record motion of robotic arms that will give away inconsistencies.

These sensors work much like the nervous system in our body. Each sensor on it’s own is somewhat useful, but when you start combining the sensory data from multiple sources along with statistics and previous recordings, you really start to leverage the potential. Feeling the ground tremble, hearing a train horn, and seeing that you are standing on train tracks, are of little value on their own, but combining the information might prove life saving. With such input, you know that taking one step to the side is smarter than running along the tracks.

This is what we call predictive maintenance. Measuring, in real-time, how machines are doing and combining it with statistics and knowledge to fix things before they break, not after. This gives customers the chance to plan for down time, and do repairs before faulty parts affects others. In many cases, they can limit repairs to a few dollars instead of thousands.

This can also be applied to the products already sold. A car manufacturer could put sensors in its  cars, which would report on how the car is performing. This would give us a large dataset to find faults and errors, which would help evolve future products or make the servicing the cars smarter. In other words, letting the customer know that a part is about to break before it actually does.

On a smarter planet, we will stop treating cars — or machines — as a homogenous group. Since each one is used differently, it should be serviced by looking at the health of each part, and not when the booklet tells you it’s due for servicing.

Please continue the conversation with Chris on Friday, September 12 on IBM’s People for a Smarter Planet Facebook to learn more on predictive maintenance.  

Technorati Tags: Analytics, IBM, predictive analytics, predictive maintenance

Recently, IBM detailed two new computers that will help change the way the world, literally, works.

The first, Sequoia, is the world’s most powerful supercomputer, capable of calculating in one hour what would otherwise take 6.7 billion people using hand calculators 320 years to complete if they worked non-stop. It is installed at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA)’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

The second is the first commercial machine, cooled by hot water, built for the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre in Germany. It will be used by scientists across Europe to drive a wide range of research ­­− from simulating the blood flow behind an artificial heart valve, to devising quieter aeroplanes.

What’s impressive about these machines is not just their massive processing power alone, but  they are remarkably energy efficient, too.

For example, while Sequoia is more than one and a half times faster than its nearest competitor, it is almost two and a half times more energy efficient. Meanwhile, the water-cooled Leibniz machine consumes 40 percent less energy than traditional air-cooled versions. Since water is able to remove heat 4,000 times more efficiently than air, hot water is an innovative means to more efficiently cool computers than the conventional approach based on chilled water. It also allows energy to be captured from the system and reused to heat the buildings during winter. These advances afford potential energy savings of around 1 million euros per year.

Not all large-scale supercomputers need to be quite as powerful as these two. However, across Europe hundreds of machines are used to run essential daily tasks in the numerous data centers that power many of the government and commercial systems we take for granted.

As a result, information and communication technology already consumes 8 to 10 percent of the EU’s electricity and by 2020 that figure may double. Data centers in Western Europe alone consume up to 100 billion kilowatt hours a year. That’s more or less the total electricity consumption of the Netherlands.

That’s why the European Commission has created a Code of Conduct to encourage all data center operators to reduce energy consumption in a cost-effective manner. The guidance provides a set of best practices.

In May 2012, the European Union Code of Conduct for Datacenters pronounced IBM the Corporate Participant winner for 2012. Dr. Paolo Bertoldi, Principal Administrator at the European Commission Joint Research Centre in charge of research activities on energy efficiency policy, praised IBM for its systematic approach and for achieving results in a large number of data centers.

It’s the latest in a line of environmental awards since IBM announced its first corporate policy on environmental affairs in 1971.

What does IBM do to maintain its energy efficiency leadership in its data centers? Older hardware equipment is continually upgraded while industry-leading server consolidation and virtualization techniques are also employed to help ensure computers run at optimal capacity.

Analytics plays a crucial role too: Mobile Measurement Technology (MMT), developed by IBM Research, instruments the data centers with thousands of sensors to record and analyze temperatures and air flow to detect hot and cold spots. By providing energy flow insight in real-time, MMT provides the intelligence to enable more efficient cooling.

In an increasingly instrumented and interconnected world, the amount of data the world is producing is growing exponentially; we reckon there will be around 44 times as much data and content over the next decade as there is today.

Gaining insight and intelligence from all that data will largely be the job of the world’s supercomputers and that will take a great deal of processing and energy power. We’ll continue to work tirelessly on increasing the first while systematically reducing the second.

Technorati Tags: IBM, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Leibniz Supercomputing Centre, Sequoia