Friday, December 2, 2011

FOAK Tale in DC Water

Hidden beneath the highways and streets of Washington DC is a sprawling infrastructure of hundreds of thousands of assets — water distribution pipes, valves, collection pipes, man holes, water meters and fire hydrants ... To keep the system running smoothly and predict potential failure using analytics tool, IBM Research was engaged in a First-of-a-kind (FOAK) project in 2010.

Here's their story:

Friday, September 23, 2011

jBook: Big Data & Cloud

Blog:

jPage: Amazon

jGuide: Institutions

Supercomputing Center
The following are leading supercomputing centers based on the campus of elite research universities:

jGuide: Companies


jGuide: People


jBook: Analytics

Convergence

Overview

Tools


  • Analytics System
  • Full-suite Business Analytics
    • Pentaho (business analytics with Hadoop)
  • Big Data Anlytics
    • Datameer (Hadoop analytics software application)
  • Enterprise Application
    • Varicent (sale performance management)
  • Content Analytics

Systems



Update:
  • 2012.09.23 - jBook published

jBook: Big Data & Analytics

Overview:

Events:

jBook: Big Data


Convergence

Tools:




Update:
  • 2012.09.23 - this page becomes part of jBook

jBook: HPC

Convergence


Journey Series:

Software
  • File System
    • GPFS (IBM | General Parallel File System)
    • Ceph (Open-source  | distributed network storage and file system)

Architecture

Systems

Update:
  • 2012.09.23: jBook-HPC published

jBook: Cloud

Convergence

Platforms

Appliances

Tools

Other Blogs:

Update:
  • 2012.09.24 - jBook-Cloud published

jBook: HPC - Cloud

Perspectives:

Providers:

Update:
  • 2012.09.23 - created this jBook page

jBook: Big Data HPC

HPC moves Big Data from batch orientation to real-time, mission critical, and helps deliver real time answers to real time data analysis.  It is also assisted by intelligence built into storage with examples including IBM GPFS-SNC and Intel True Scale Fabric optimizing for big data on interconnects.

Initiative:

Issues:

Events:


Update:
  • 2012.09.23 - creating this page as part of jBook 
  • 2012.09.26 - added Gordon

Monday, September 12, 2011

Watson Debuts for Healthcare

Watson, the "Jeopardy!"-playing IBM supercomputer, is getting a new job.
 
 
Watson technology, developed by IBM Research, combines natural language processing with machine learning.  WellPoint said today (2011.09.12) that it plans to use Watson to help suggest treatment options and diagnoses to doctors. It is part of a far broader push in the health industry to incorporate computerized guidance into care, as doctors and hospitals adopt electronic medical records and other digital tools that can record, track and check their work.

The first Watson deployment would come early next year with WellPoint nurses who manage complex patient cases and review treatment requests from medical providers. 

The second project, targeted to begin in 2012, will enlist several hundred oncologists who are not WellPoint employees but can access the system through their own computer or tablets. The doctors will be able to query the Watson-based application to help them decide on the best treatment for individual patients. In addition, the application will eventually essentially read over the physicians shoulders when they’re researching a case and offer additional information based on what they’re looking at.

“This could be game changing. It changes the dynamics of healthcare,” says Dr. Anthony Nguyen, senior vice president of care management at WellPoint. “But people are skeptical and we have to work with them to win over some thought leaders.”

Nguyen says he was thrilled when he first watched Watson in action on Jeopardy! via YouTube clips. “I’m impressed with the capability of Watson to process so much information in such a small amount of time,” he says. “A doctor doesn’t have to perform a plethora of tests. This is like having a room full of the top experts to help him diagnose. It puts him on par with the world’s experts, which gives him greater confidence that he’s doing the right thing for his patients.”

WellPoint ultimately wants to provide the Watson service more broadly to physicians who treat complicated chronic conditions, and they hope to create an application that could be accessed directly by patients seeking health information.

 


Researchers have been trying since the 1970s to develop computers that can advise doctors, but the efforts haven't gotten much traction. Now, though, the health industry is under unprecedented pressure to digitize. At the same time, medical providers are increasingly paid based at least partly on quality-of-care measures. 

Electronic medical records already often incorporate at least rudimentary "clinical decision support" tools, such as automatic warnings about possible drug interactions. Others integrate more complex versions, like a service from Anvita Health Inc. that can make treatment recommendations and one from Isabel Healthcare Inc. that focuses on suggesting potential diagnoses.

Oncologists said they would like to test a technology like Watson that could take on their most complicated questions. But, they said, it would be important to understand the process and data that led to the recommendations—and to be sure the computer system was programmed to seek out the most effective options, with cost a secondary consideration.

Watson hasn't yet been used in a real-world health setting. Researchers at Columbia University and the University of Maryland have been helping IBM to select medical data, including textbooks and treatment guidelines, and to help integrate Watson capabilities into electronic medical records. They say they have tested it using thousands of medical-quiz questions.

Herbert Chase, a Columbia professor of clinical medicine who is an IBM consultant, said he tried on Watson a tough case he had experienced as a young doctor: a woman in her thirties with severe muscle weakness, who had blood tests indicating a low level of phosphate and elevated alkaline phosphatase, an enzyme. Watson's top suggestions were hyperparathyroidism and rickets. It also flagged the possibility of a rare form of rickets that is vitamin D resistant—which the woman indeed had. Dr. Chase said Watson displays excerpts to identify its data sources.


Tuesday, August 30, 2011

j-Tool: IBM GPFS

General Parallel File System is a high-performance file system that underlies many of IBM's HPC cluster, storage and cloud solutions.


jBlog on GPFS:

Getting Started with GPFS:


Wiki, Forum and Groups

Whitepaper:



Last updated on 2012.03.21

Friday, July 1, 2011

IBM Brings Out Tools for HPC Cloud

IBM hopes to help companies more efficiently use their high-performance computing resources with new software that links separate pools of resources into a single private cloud. IBM is making the HPC Management Suite for Cloud software available after using it internally.

"It brings together what traditionally has been siloed HPC environments," said Brian Connors, vice president of high performance computing at IBM.

Typically, organizations with heavy engineering operations will have separate server farms used by individual groups of engineers, he said. That arrangement often leaves computing resources unused.

For many businesses, pooling together multiple high-performance computing systems can have benefits beyond the improved efficiencies that come from using otherwise idle resources. By combining all of a company's high-performance computing resources, individual engineering groups could have access to more cores and thus finish projects faster. "It's about getting the job done faster because you're throwing hardware at the job," Connors said.

More than 3,000 engineers around the world in its Systems Development organization shared resources as they developed the POWER7 processor family use an  IBM internal HPC Cloud. It claims to have cut costs in half and reduced the design cycle by six months as a result of using the software.

The product works on X86 machines as well as IBM's Power Platform running Linux operating systems.
It doesn't use virtualization, which engineers typically shun because it can slow down the work. IBM's workload management software levels the loads. Rebooting is not required as workloads shift, Connors said.

IBM is also offering services for customers who might want help installing the suite and getting started using it.

It will also offer industry-specific versions of the HPC cloud offerings starting with one that is optimized for electronics companies and automotive and aerospace manufacturers.

Update:
  • 2011.07.01 - original post

Sunday, May 1, 2011

jGuide - About Journey to Frontier of Technology

Welcome to "Journey to Frontier of Technology", a first-hand, eye-witness account of my journey to the frontier of technology, where Cloud, Big Data, HPC are converging to deliver the next wave of innovation that will change the way information technologies are deployed and used.

I am a business development executive with IBM with focus on Smarter Computing. I'm also an IBM senior-certified solution architect with 10 years of experience in high-performance computing. I have designed supercomputers that are powering world's largest corporation and elite research universities.


Career blog:

Landmark of this Blog:

Links:

Update:
  • 2012.08.27 - created this page
  • 2012.09.12 - update

Saturday, January 1, 2011

Start of the Blog

I started my first-ever blog today with topics on cutting-edge information technologies - high-performance computing, cloud computing, dynamic infrastructure open-source world - software and application that enrich our work and life.