Analytics Processing Speed Gets a Boost from New IBM Architecture

At the Supercomputing 2010 conference, IBM released details of a new storage architecture design that can double analytics processing speed.

Announced on Nov. 19 at the conference in New Orleans, the new architecture created by IBM researchers can convert terabytes of pure information into actionable insights twice as fast as previously possible. IBM said the new architecture is primarily useful for cloud computing applications and data-intensive workloads such as digital media, data mining and financial analytics, and it can cut hours off of complex computations without requiring heavy infrastructure investment.

Moreover, IBM won the Storage Challenge competition for presenting the most innovative and effective design in high performance computing with the best measurements of performance, scalability and storage subsystem utilization.

Created at IBM Research, Almaden, the new General Parallel File System-Shared Nothing Cluster (GPFS-SNC) architecture is designed to provide higher availability through advanced clustering technologies, dynamic file system management and advanced data replication techniques. By "sharing nothing," new levels of availability, performance and scaling are achievable. GPFS-SNC is a distributed computing architecture in which each node is self-sufficient; tasks are then divided up between these independent computers and no one waits on the other, IBM said in a press release on the new architecture.