IBM Watson Advances a New Category of Cognitive Computing

IBM Watson blends existing and innovative technology into a new approach called cognitive computing. At the simplest operational level it is technology for asking natural language-based questions, getting answers and support appropriate action to be taken or provide information to make 

 more informed decisions.

  

The technology relies on massive processing power to yield probabilistic responses to user questions using sophisticated analytical algorithms. A cognitive system like Watson accesses structured and unstructured information within an associated knowledge base to return responses that are not simply data but contextualized information that can inform users’ actions and guide their decisions. This is a gigantic leap beyond human decision-making using experience based on random sources from the industry and internal sets of reports and data.

This innovative new approach to computing is designed to aid humans by working with natural language – English in the case of today’s Watson. This approach earned Watson the 2012 Technology Innovation Award in the category of Overall Operational Innovation.

For those of you who are not used to the word cognitive, the foundation of cognition is the sum of all the thinking processes that contrib­ute to gaining knowledge for problem-solving. In computational systems these process­es are modeled using hardware and software; machine-based cognition thus is a step toward imbuing an arti­fi­cial system with attributes we typically consider human: the abilities to think and learn. Watson builds on a foundation of evidence from preexisting decisions and knowledge sources that it can load for reference in future inquiries. The evidence-based reasoning that Watson employs to answer question is part of the big deal in its approach.

Watson supports three types of engagement – ask, discover and decide – that take natural language questions, find facts to support a decision process, then gets probabilistic guidance on decisions. This goes beyond search and retrieval technology; machine learning and processing of questions using very large volumes of data, commonly referred to as big data, is the foundation on which Watson as a cognitive system operates. Most important is the continuous learning method and what I would call adaptive intelligence. While machine learning and pattern-based analytics are part of the cognitive system, the ability to process big data efficiently to provide a probabilistic set of recommendations is just the kind of innovation many industries need.

IBM has focused much of its work on Watson on healthcare, with potential life-saving implications in an environment where doctors must make crucial decisions in the midst of pressure from the complexity, costs, overload of information and policies. Watson can ingest large volumes of information from reports and documents that can accelerate its learning processes to support a range of healthcare needs. Watson can be used in three areas in healthcare: teaching, practice and payment. IBM works with Wellpoint to support doctors in making decisions, and also eliminating waste or misapplied treatments that insurance providers have to cover. Watson is being used today to determine where improvements can be made in cancer treatment. IBM has targeted specific Watson solutions to help in the research, diagnosis and treatment, care and utilization aspects of battling cancer.

  

IBM has a huge opportunity to bring innovation to business through the use of Watson, and has been experimenting with a number of deployments to test its potential. Innovative technology is a priority today for business improvement initiatives (60%) and to improve the quality of business processes (57%) – the top two factors driving technology selection according to our business technology innovation benchmark research. IBM has been working with organizations in healthcare and financial services, but believes Watson could be useful in just about every industry that must have what I call better situation intelligence that must accommodate current conditions and preexisting information to determine the best answer. While IBM will not be the only supplier of cognitive systems, it is pretty much the sole supplier of one that can be purchased and adapted to a business today. IBM is still working to improve the methods by which its cognitive system operates, as well as the interface with which it delivers answers. As IBM moves forward, it will be challenged to create attractive packages and prices for Watson and its computing technology (i.e. hardware, memory, storage and processing potential), as this new approach is not something that organizations have experienced before. Despite this challenge, IBM Watson represents a step forward that the IT and technology industry does not see very often. After my assessment of IBM Watson at the IBM Analyst Insights (Twitter: @AnalystInsights) where I got to have an in depth discussion with the leaders of IBM Watson provided more insight to what is possible with the technology and path for its investments into its cognitive system. I would recommend that organizations take a look at the future of business technology computing that will be able to make a significant impact on the operations of any organization.

Regards,

Mark Smith

CEO & Chief Research Officer

By: Mark Smith

Source: http://marksmith.ventanaresearch.com/2012/12/11/ibm-watson-advances-a-new-category-of-cognitive-computing/

IBM could speed up large-scale computing by putting optical communication tools in chips

 

 

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Light-based communication promises superfast, cheap, and scalable computing, but much of the technology is still in development. Now, at this week's IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting in San Francisco, IBM has announced that a system based on light is ready for mass production. Called silicon nanophotonics technology, the system involves putting electrical circuits together with optical elements on a single, tiny chip. Fast pulses of light can then transmit information between chips in data centers or supercomputers, speeding up transfers and preventing the bottlenecks that can occur in traditional computing. Dr. Solomon Assefa of IBM also tells Ars Technica that the technology allows for more flexible system architecture: "Once you have this sort of universal technology, it provides a lot of different kinds of bandwidth capability."
IBM has been working on silicon nanophotonics for a decade and presented a proof of concept in 2010, but it now says the system has been tested and can be manufactured using standard methods. That means it could soon be used to develop faster supercomputers for solving power-intensive problems like modeling the universe, or to build the data centers that power cloud computing operations.

By: Adi Robertson
Source: http://www.theverge.com/2012/12/11/3755742/ibm-silicon-nanophotonics-chips

IBM's nanophotonic tech integrates optic data right into chips

 

IBM's integrated silicon nanophotonics transceiver on a chip; optical waveguides are highlighted here in blue, and the copper conductors of the electronic components in yellow.
IBM Research

IBM has developed a technology that integrates optical communications and electronics in silicon, allowing optical interconnects to be integrated directly with integrated circuits in a chip. That technology, called silicon nanophotonics, is now moving out of the labs and is ready to become a product. It could potentially revolutionize how processors, memory, and storage in supercomputers and data centers interconnect.
Silicon nanophotonics were first demonstrated by IBM in 2010 as part of IBM Research's efforts to build Blue Waters, the NCSA supercomputer project that the company withdrew from in 2011. But IBM Research continued to develop the technology, and today announced that it was ready for mass production. For the first time, the technology "has been verified and manufactured in a 90-nanometer CMOS commercial foundry," Dr. Solomon Assefa, Nanophotonics Scientist for IBM Research, told Ars.
A single CMOS-based nanophotonic transceiver is capable of converting data between electric and optical with virtually no latency, handling a data connection of more than 25 gigabits per second. Depending on the application, hundreds of transceivers could be integrated into a single CMOS chip, pushing terabits of data over fiber-optic connections between processors, memory, and storage systems optically over distances ranging from two centimeters to two kilometers.

Cheap and scalable, the technology could have a huge impact on how data centers for public cloud computing and other "exascale" applications—and the computers in them—are built. Eventually, it could find its way into processors themselves, though the low cost of 90-nanometer chips makes them "the most cost-effective solution looking into the next decade," Assefa said.

The computer as network

Many of the current "petascale" supercomputers use optical interconnects to transfer data between computing nodes. Cloud computing data centers, VI social networking data centers, and other "exascale" computing environments are all potential beneficiaries of silicon nanophotonics. Applications that run in data centers like those of Facebook and Google all face the problem of data bottleneck. "These services are relying on increasingly interconnected networks," Assefa said.
For many distributed applications—such as Hadoop-based data analysis, video, and image processing—the greatest limiting factor is often the network, as information flows between processors. Network connections are also expensive, as they rely on additional hardware to manage them.
But direct optical connections could change the architecture of the systems built for these applications. They could be integrated into data center racks, allowing the components of servers to be set up in different physical units without a loss of performance. It could also allow for much more efficient and redundant storage networking. "Once you have this sort of universal technology," Assefa said, "it provides a lot of different kinds of bandwidth capability. "
For now, IBM is not making any announcements about actual product based on CMOS silicon nanophotonics. Assefa would not say if IBM intends to license the technology. But the first natural targets for the technology are IBM's own supercomputer and CMOS-based mainframe systems.

By: Sean Gallagher
Source: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/12/ibms-nanophotonic-tech-integrates-optic-data-right-into-chips/

IBM announces major breakthrough with silicon nanophotonics

(Nanowerk News) IBM announced today a major advance in the ability to use light instead of electrical signals to transmit information for future computing. The breakthrough technology – called “silicon nanophotonics” – allows the integration of different optical components side-by-side with electrical circuits on a single silicon chip using, for the first time, sub-100nm semiconductor technology. Silicon nanophotonics takes advantage of pulses of light for communication and provides a super highway for large volumes of data to move at rapid speeds between computer chips in servers, large datacenters, and supercomputers, thus alleviating the limitations of congested data traffic and high-cost traditional interconnects. “This technology breakthrough is a result of more than a decade of pioneering research at IBM,” said Dr. John E. Kelly, Senior Vice President and Director of IBM Research. “This allows us to move silicon nanophotonics technology into a real-world manufacturing environment that will have impact across a range of applications.”   The amount of data being created and transmitted over enterprise networks continues to grow due to an explosion of new applications and services. Silicon nanophotonics, now primed for commercial development, can enable the industry to keep pace with increasing demands in chip performance and computing power. Businesses are entering a new era of computing that requires systems to process and analyze, in real-time, huge volumes of information known as Big Data. Silicon nanophotonics technology provides answers to Big Data challenges by seamlessly connecting various parts of large systems, whether few centimeters or few kilometers apart from each other, and move terabytes of data via pulses of light through optical fibers. Building on its initial proof of concept in 2010 ("Breakthrough nanophotonic chip technology lights the path to exascale computing"), IBM has solved the key challenges of transferring the silicon nanophotonics technology into the commercial foundry. By adding a few processing modules into a high-performance 90nm CMOS fabrication line, a variety of silicon nanophotonics components such as wavelength division multiplexers (WDM), modulators, and detectors are integrated side-by-side with a CMOS electrical circuitry. As a result, single-chip optical communications transceivers can be manufactured in a conventional semiconductor foundry, providing significant cost reduction over traditional approaches. IBM’s CMOS nanophotonics technology demonstrates transceivers to exceed the data rate of 25Gbps per channel. In addition, the technology is capable of feeding a number of parallel optical data streams into a single fiber by utilizing compact on-chip wavelength-division multiplexing devices. The ability to multiplex large data streams at high data rates will allow future scaling of optical communications capable of delivering terabytes of data between distant parts of computer systems. Further details will be presented this week by Dr. Solomon Assefa at the IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) in the talk titled, “A 90nm CMOS Integrated Nano-Photonics Technology for 25Gbps WDM Optical Communications Applications.” Additional papers being presented by IBM at IEDM can be seen here.

 

By: IBM

Sources: http://www.nanowerk.com/news2/newsid=27949.php

IBM pushes silicon photonics with on-chip optics

Big Blue researchers have figured out how to use standard manufacturing processes to make chips with built-in optical links that can transfer 25 gigabits of data per second.

This close-up photo shows an IBM chip wired up with both electrical links, shown in yellow, and optical waveguides, shown in blue. Conventional computers today transfer data with electrons traveling along electrical links, but researchers hope higher data-transfer speeds can be achieved by sending photons on optical links.

(Credit: IBM Research)

IBM has advanced the technology of silicon photonics, fabricating a microchip that has built-in components to send and receive data over optical links.

Researchers have built optical data links into chips before, but IBM's move is notable because it uses conventional chipmaking equipment geared for chips with 90-nanometer features. Today's chips use metal wires to exchange data, but optical links offer the potential of higher transfer speeds over longer distances.

The chip can include several optical components including wavelength division multiplexers that let the chip send and receive signals with multiple frequencies of light, an approach that lets more data be sent over the same channel in a given amount of time.

The IBM chip can handle data rates of 25 gigabits per second, and the researchers expect to increase that through technology improvements and by building multiple communication channels that work in parallel.

The research is part of IBM's continuing effort to improve computing performance despite Moore's Law challenges.

IBM expects the technology to benefit large-scale systems -- supercomputers, multiple servers linked together, or the data-pathway "backplanes" within servers. It's not unusual for higher-end server technology to trickle down to consumer products, though.

The 90nm process IBM used isn't as advanced as the 22nm one that Intel uses for its latest "Ivy Bridge" generation of processors found in higher-end PCs today. But IBM's approach is the first time silicon photonics has been built into chips with a process size less than 100nm, the paper said. (A nanometer is a billionth of a meter; about 1,100 elements of 90nm chip circuitry could fit side by side across the diameter of a human hair.)

IBM's approach also makes efficient use of electrical power, an important consideration given the power limits processor and computer designers face today. 

by: Stephen Shankland 

Source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-57557788-92/ibm-pushes-silicon-photonics-with-on-chip-optics/