IBM: Watson will eventually fit on a smartphone, diagnose illness

IBM's Jeopardy!-winning supercomputer, Watson, may have started out the size of a master bedroom, but it will eventually shrink to the size of a smart phone, its inventors say.

The supercomputer is currently performing "residencies" at several hospitals around the country, offering its data analytics capabilities for diagnosing and suggesting patient treatments.

IBM is also working to program Watson so that it can pass the U.S. Medical Licensing Examination. Yes, the "Dr. Watson" moniker used in the media will someday be applicable.

Even today, a Watson supercomputer with the same computational capabilities as the system that took on Jeopardy!'s all-time champions, is a fraction of its former size. And, the smaller Watson is almost two-and-a-half times faster than the original system, according to Dan Pelino, general manager of IBM's Global Healthcare & Life Sciences business.

"It was the size of a master bedroom, but now it's the size of a bathroom," Pelino said "It will get to be a handheld device by 2020 based on a trajectory of Moore's Law."

By then, Pelino said, he can envision Watson being capable of image recognition sophisticated enough to determine the difference between a life-threatening bug bite and a rash on a child in a developing nation. It could then recommend treatment based on its diagnosis, Pelino said.

It's not so far-fetched, considering IBM has allocated $7 billion toward the Watson supercomputer's research and development.

Digesting unstructured data

One area IBM scientists are working to improve with Watson is its ability to process unstructured data - physicians' notes, research published in peer-reviewed medical and science journals, radiological images, biofeedback from wireless monitoring devices, and even comment threads from online patient communities. All of that information can be used in the melting pot of data analytics.

"Ninety percent of the world's information has been created over the past 10 years, and 80% of that 90% is unstructured data," said Manoj Saxena, general manager of Watson solutions in IBM's Software Group. "That data needs to be digestible."

Today, Watson is developing its resume working with oncologists at Memorial-Kettering Cancer Center in diagnosing and treating patients.

That project, announced a year ago, follows efforts by IBM and WellPoint to jointly develop applications that will essentially turn Watson into an adviser for oncologists at Cedars-Sinai's Samuel Oschin Comprehensive Cancer Institute in Los Angeles.

Last month, IBM announced that WellPoint and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center unveiled the first commercially developed Watson-based cognitive computing breakthroughs.

To date, Watson has ingested more than 600,000 pieces of medical evidence, two million pages of text from 42 medical journals and clinical trials in the area of oncology research. In a matter of seconds, Watson can sift through 1.5 million patient records representing decades of cancer treatment history, such as medical records and patient outcomes, and provide to physicians evidence based treatment options.

Jeopardy! Is old news

The Watson supercomputer that handily beat past Jeopardy! champions was made up of 90 IBM Power 750 Express servers powered by eight-core processors -- four in each machine for a total of 32 processors per machine. The clustered system had 2,880 cores and 15TB of memory. The servers were virtualized using a kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) implementation, creating a server cluster with a total processing capacity of 80 teraflops. A teraflop is 1 trillion operations per second.

Today, Watson's software can run on one-sixteenth the number of servers the original system used, Pelino said.

Saxena sees a time when big data and the Watson supercomputer are integrated, allowing it to focus its teraflop processing capabilities on, for example, personal genomics. Watson and other supercomputers could access massive gene-sequencing data stores to determine which patients react best to specific medicines, ushering in an era of personalized healthcare.

"We refer to this as Big Data cognitive analytics," Saxena said. "Cloud embedded with the cognitive capabilities of Watson. You'll see this by the end of this year."

Right now, Watson's cognitive abilities to crunch massive amounts of data and interpret the results is limited "to a few people in the U.S.," Saxena said, referring to its current deployment in only a few hospitals.

"It's like you're the Coca Cola company, and you only have one fountain dispenser in this country in Houston. Everybody likes Coke, but they have to go to Houston to drink Coke. I want Watson to be the bottling and distribution plant for all of their [the medical industry's] knowledge and distributed around the world through a browser, through a handheld, through whatever interface," Saxena said.

"Big data will make Moore's Law look small," he said.

Lucas Mearian covers storage, disaster recovery and business continuity, financial services infrastructure and health care IT for Computerworld. Follow Lucas on Twitter at @lucasmearian or subscribe to Lucas's RSS feed. His e-mail address is lmearian@computerworld.com.

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IBM to beef up content management, analytics in Connections enterprise social product

IBM will launch before mid-year several new and improved collaboration and communication products, including a new suite for human resources tasks and a major upgrade of its Connections enterprise social networking product.

The company, which will unveil the products at its Connect 2013 conference in Orlando on Monday, will also announce improvements to its enterprise social suite for marketers.

The upgrade to its IBM Connections enterprise social networking platform will feature new analytics features so that administrators can monitor usage, such as collaboration trends among employees and engagement with customers in social media services like Twitter and Facebook.

IBM Connections 4.5, which will be available in March, will also feature new document and content management capabilities, as well as an "ideation" tool to manage brainstorming processes. This new version will also feature deeper integration with Microsoft Outlook, so that users can access IBM Connections features within their Outlook interface.

"This 4.5 version is a momentum announcement," said Rob Koplowitz, a Forrester Research analyst. "IBM continues to grow, add functionality to and improve Connections."

The content management functionality makes Connections a stronger competitor to Microsoft's SharePoint, which in turn is encroaching further into the Connections territory with its upcoming integration with the Yammer enterprise social networking software.

The suites for human resources and marketing departments are designed to give employees collaboration tools like microblogging, IM, video conferencing, activity streams, employee profiles, document sharing, content rating, wikis and discussion forums.

The new IBM Employee Experience Suite will include existing IBM enterprise social and communication software along with human resources management applications from Kenexa, a company IBM acquired in December for $1.3 billion. This new suite will be available in this year's first half.

Meanwhile, the existing IBM Customer Experience Suite, designed for marketing departments, will gain a new capability to let marketers push content, like ads and promotions, to social networks "with one simple click" and without requiring IT involvement.

IBM also plans to ship in March an upgrade of its Notes-Domino email and collaboration software, called IBM Notes and Domino Social Edition 9.

"We have an enterprise social business platform that is for social networking, content management, analytics, and can be leveraged across all business departments," said Jeff Schick, vice president of social software at IBM.

Juan Carlos Perez covers enterprise communication/collaboration suites, operating systems, browsers and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Follow Juan on Twitter at@JuanCPerezIDG.

IBM drops Power7+ in high-end Unix servers

IBM has started to roll out a new processor for its Power family of servers, a staggered affair that will start with higher-end systems and eventually reach the midrange and low-end boxes.

The new Power7+ chip has a higher clock speed than its predecessor, at up to 4.4Ghz, but the biggest change is in the Level 3 on-chip memory cache, which IBM has expanded to a sizeable 80MB, from 32MB on the Power7.

The bigger cache means more of the data being used for calculations -- the "working set" -- can be stored on the chip close to the CPU cores, which helps to speed operations. With a smaller cache, data has to be fetched more frequently from main memory.

The higher clock speed and larger cache will give a boost in performance for databases and Java applications, according to Satya Sharma , CTO for IBM's Power Systems business and an IBM "fellow," or one of its top engineers. "We can improve performance for some Java applications by up to 40 percent compared to the Power7," Sharma said.

IBM's top brass are due to discuss its systems business during a customer webcast at 11 am Eastern Wednesday. They may also talk about a new, high-end storage system called the DS8870 and an update to IBM's DB2 Analytics Accelerator, which are also being announced.

Across the country at about the same time, Oracle systems chief John Fowler is due to give a keynote speech at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco, and Hewlett-Packard is holding its financial analyst day, where it's sure to give an update on its systems strategy.

None of the vendors have a lot to cheer about, at least when it comes to Unix: Unix systems revenue dropped 20 percent in the June quarter, to $2.3 billion, according to recent figures from IDC. But at least IBM's revenue declined only 10 percent, and it managed to gain 6.1 points of market share, IDC said.

The Power7+ is being offered now for the Power 770 and 780 systems, which sit near the high-end of the Power line-up. It will come eventually to lower-end systems as well, like the 740 and 750, but IBM isn't saying yet when that will be.

IBM's most powerful Unix machine, the Power 795, won't get the new chip at all, Sharma said. Customers that buy such high-end systems generally prefer stability to incremental upgrades, he said, adding that IBM took the same tack when it introduced the Power 6+.

The 795 will get at least one technical boost, however. IBM is introducing a new memory module with twice the density, so the maximum configuration for the 795 increases from 8TB of main memory to 16TB. The 770 and 780 also get the denser DIMMs.

IBM is also introducing a new memory compression accelerator that can "make a 32GB system look like a 48GB or 64GB system," Sharma said. That can help reduce memory costs for customers, but there's a trade-off in increased latency as data is decompressed for use.

With the Power7+, IBM has also doubled the number of virtual machines customers can run on each processor core, to 10 VMs. While customers might not want that many virtual machines for production use, developers can use them for jobs like compiling code, Sharma said.

Another feature that's been discussed with the Power7+ -- the ability to put two processors in one socket -- also isn't available yet. The DCM, or Dual Chip Module, effectively increases the operations per second that customers get from each socket, with the trade-off that the cores run at lower clock speeds.

It's not being offered for the high-end Power systems machines, however. "It's partly that there is a little bit more work to do, and partly it's the class of systems where we want to use that capability," Sharma said. He wouldn't give details but implied the technology is destined for midrange or lower-end systems like the Power 740 and 750.

IBM offers a sort of "compute on demand" scheme for its Power systems, through which customers can pay to activate additional processor cores for a few weeks or months, such as during the holiday shopping season, then disable again them afterwards.

It's running a "special offer" for customers who buy a new 780 or 795 system. For each processor that ships with the server, they get 15 days of additional processing for free. So if a customer buys a Power 780 system with 16 cores enabled, they also get 15 days when they can turn on an additional 16 cores.

It's also introducing a concept called Power System Pools, which lets customers use those 15 days -- and any other compute days they purchase -- across up to 10 different 780 or 795 servers. Essentially it gives customers more flexibility in how they allocate their processor resources, and, IBM hopes, makes them a bit more likely to choose IBM.

IBM doesn't usually publish prices for such high-end systems but the faster chips will come in at about the same price point as their predecessors, Sharma said. It will offer slightly better pricing on the Power 780 because it would prefer more customers bought its higher-end systems, he said.

James Niccolai covers data centers and general technology news for IDG News Service. Follow James on Twitter at @jniccolai. James's e-mail address is james_niccolai@idg.com