Items tagged with (NYSE: IBM)
We've long been promised that computers will be able to make us healthier, which of course includes being able to detect and fight cancers. Now, we see a real-life example of that happening, and thanks is owed to IBM's powerful Watson supercomputer. When a Japanese patient had some form of leukemia that doctors were unable to pinpoint, IBM's Watson was brought in to compare their genetic records to more than 20 million others against this patient's. Fortunately, doing so proved successful, as the patient's exact variant was found. Not only that, Watson's helped this patient receive treatment a lot quicker than they would have, and best of all? It proved successful. While doctors are able...
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There is one constant in the world of supercomputers: no one is going to be 'fastest' for long. In fact, some supercomputers can seem downright slow after only a couple of years, as hardware continues to become faster and more dense. Take for example Oak Ridge's TITAN supercomputer. Launched in 2013, this supercomputer managed to push about 20 petaFLOPs of throughput (17.59 pFLOPs LINPACK; 27 pFLOPs theoretical). At the time, that was downright mind-blowing. But consider TaihuLight, China's latest supercomputer, coming in at 93 petaFLOPs. For those who don't want to grab a calculator or exercise simple math, that means that in a mere three years, China managed to push out a supercomputer 5x faster...
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In an effort to give the U.S. a leg up when it comes to supercomputers, the Department of Energy announced its plans to build two GPU-powered supercomputers that will bring the world closer to exascale computing. The DOE is awarding $325 million to build “Summit” for the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and “Sierra” at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California while an additional $100 million will go into research for “extreme scale supercomputing” technology. The supercomputers are expected to be installed in 2017 using next-generation IBM POWER servers coupled with NVIDIA Tesla GPU accelerators and NVIDIA NVLink high-speed GPU interconnect...
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Emulating the behavior of a human brain is one of the toughest challenges scientists and engineers have ever faced. A major reason for that is the sheer amount of computational power our brains possess. Feel dumb because you turned the coffee machine on and forgot to add the water? Don't fret - your brain is still an amazingly complex thing. Today's computers, and especially supercomputers, offer an incredible level of performance, but they operate in a far stricter way than our brains, with its many neurons, do. They can, and have emulated the human brain to a great extent in the past, but it's long been argued that truer emulation would reap greater rewards. Quite simply, a computer-backed...
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As mobile carriers across the North American landscape make moves to position themselves as more than just utilities, AT&T is unveiling a new partnership with a huge enterprise mainstay in order to prove precisely that. AT&T and IBM announced this week that they'll be joining forces in order to "combine their analytic platforms, cloud, and security technologies with privacy in mind to gain more insights on data collected from machines in a variety of industries." On the whole, the two will be working to extend the premise of the "Internet of Things," with IBM handling back-end infrastructure and AT&T handling wireless communications. According to the two, the new alliance will initially...
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Out of seemingly nowhere, Linux is becoming a hot topic. Major technology players ranging from Google to IBM are coming forward in support of the open-source OS, and at LinuxCon 2013, IBM announced plans to invest one billion dollars in new Linux and open source technologies for IBM's Power Systems servers. As IBM puts it: "the investment aims to help clients capitalize on big data and cloud computing with modern systems built to handle the new wave of applications coming to the data center in the post-PC era." Two immediate initiatives announced, a new client center in Europe and a Linux on Power development cloud, focus on rapidly expanding IBM’s growing ecosystem supporting Linux on...
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Forget about artificial intelligence, researchers at IBM are working on a software ecosystem designed for programming silicon chips that could mimic human brain functions such as perception, action, and cognition. IBM said its solution is "dramatically different" from others before it, noting that it's tailored for a new class of distributed, highly interconnected, asynchronous, parallel, large-scale, cognitive computing architectures. "Architectures and programs are closely intertwined and a new architecture necessitates a new programming paradigm," said Dr. Dharmendra S. Modha, Principal Investigator and Senior Manager, IBM Research. "We are working to create a FORTRAN for synaptic computing...
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IBM is following in the footsteps of ARM and will begin licensing its core intellectual property for its POWER technologies to other companies for use in designing servers employed in cloud data centers, the company announced. The licensing model is part of IBM's OpenPOWER Consortium, a new initiative aimed at expanding the technology choices available to modern IT developers, or so the official explanation goes. In reality, IBM is offering up its POWER chip technology to anyone who wants it, which in the long run will make IBM (and its hardware partners) more competitive with AMD and Intel. IBM has already found some willing participants to join its consortium, including Google, Mellanox, TYAN,...
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Say your goodbyes, folks, Lotus 1-2-3 is being forced into retirement. For those of you old enough to remember Lotus 1-2-3, you might be shocked to learn that it was still on the market after all this time. Many people got their introduction to spreadsheets courtesy of IBM's legacy software, though Lotus 1-2-3 wasn't actually the first spreadsheet program to hit the PC. VisiCalc, which was originally released for the Apple II, beat Lotus 1-2-3 to the punch. Several other spreadsheet programs would follow, though none more popular back in the early and mid-1980s than Lotus 1-2-3. It was considered IBM's first "killer application," and indeed it quickly killed VisiCalc in sales after its debut...
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Bored nerds create some of the most entertaining and amazing stuff out there, but when those nerds are nanophysicists, they screw around with things at the atomic level. And when those nanophysicists work for IBM, they get paid to make things like the world’s smallest movie. If you don’t catch what’s happening in this one-minute film, it’s a stop-motion animated feature about a boy playing with an atom. It’s rather 8-bit looking, and the boy is kind of a sloppy stick figure, but you can forgive all of that when you realize that they made the film by manipulating individual atoms and magnifying them 100 million times so we can see them. Thus, the “atom”...
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IBM's net income in the first quarter of 2013 was $3 billion, a hefty sum though down slightly (1 percent) compared to the same quarter a year ago. Total revenues also took a hit, declining 5 percent (or 3 percent after adjusting for currency) year-over-year to $23.4 billion, while operating income managed to move in a positive direction, jumping 3 percent to $3.4 billion. Though IBM remained upbeat, the company readily acknowledged that it failed in certain areas. "In the first quarter, we grew operating net income, earnings per share and expanded operating margins but we did not achieve all of our goals in the period. Despite a solid start and good client demand we did not close a number of...
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Desktops and data centers are two very different beasts, and what's true of one might not be true of the other. For example, even though solid state drive (SSD) pricing has fallen dramatically in past year, it's still cheaper to equip a desktop or laptop system with a mechanical hard disk drive (HDD). The same isn't necessarily true when it comes to data centers, and if you ask IBM, the company will tell you that flash-based storage makes more economical sense at this point. How can that be? Part of the reason is because flash storage doesn't contain any moving parts, thereby making it a more reliable and durable solution, IBM says. Flash storage is also more energy efficient and doesn't require...
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IBM on Tuesday announced that the way it's going to compete with Hewlett-Packard and Oracle in the server space is by offering lower priced and easy-to-configure solutions for small-to-medium size businesses (SMBs). Towards that end, IBM rolled out eight new servers powered by its latest Power 7+ processor, starting with an entry-level model that costs less than $6,000, along with new PureSystems for big data and cloud-storage chores. "Big data and cloud systems that were once only affordable to large enterprises are now available to the masses," said Rod Adkins, Senior Vice President, IBM Systems & Technology Group. "With these new systems, IBM is forging an aggressive expansion of its Power...
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We speak often of the “patent wars”, but underpinning those battles is something else: the “patent race”, as it were, which is how quickly and comprehensively companies can patent their technologies and designs. Without copious patents in hand, the Apples, Microsofts, Samsungs, and Googles of the world couldn’t sue and counter-sue each other into oblivion. According to numbers compiled by IFI Claims Patent Services, most of the usual suspects populate the list of top 50 U.S. patent assignees. It may surprise some that topping the list is IBM, which was granted a whopping 6,478 patents in 2012; Samsung was a distant second with 5,081 patents, and a good pace behind...
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