IBM Offers Trial 'System S' Software For Stream Computing
IBM also said it is opening the IBM European Stream Computing Center in Dublin, Ireland, which will carry out research, customer support and advanced testing for European customers who apply stream computing to their business processes.
System S is designed for what IBM called "perpetual analytics," the analysis of continuous streams of data such as stock trades, retail sales and weather. IBM said the technology is capable of analyzing hundreds or even thousands of simultaneous data streams and providing realtime analysis to financial traders, retail managers, government agencies and others.
Last month IBM and TD Securities unveiled a prototype of what they called the world's fastest automated options trading system based on the System S technology running on IBM's Blue Gene supercomputer. At the time IBM called the new software "InfoSphere Streams."
IBM said the IBM System S is the result of five years of work by IBM Research. The software is based on a new data streaming architecture and what it called "breakthrough" mathematical algorithms. IBM said the technology is capable of handling not just the structured data typically found in transactional databases, but unstructured data and information from incompatible data sources.
The company is making System S trial code available to customers at no cost "to help clients better understand the software's capabilities and how they can take advantage of it for their business," IBM said in a statement. The code includes development tools, adapters and software for testing applications.