Client Examples
Uppsala University and the Swedish Institute of Space Physics are using System S to better understand "space weather," which can influence energy transmission over power lines, communications via radio and TV signals, airline and space travel, and satellites. By using the LOIS Space Center radio facility in Sweden to analyze radio emissions from space in three dimensions, scientists use this technology to compile endless amounts of data and extract predictions on activities in space. Since researchers need to measure signals from space over large time spans, the raw data generated by even one antenna quickly becomes too large to handle or store. System S analyzes the data immediately as it streams from sensors. Over the next year or so the project is expected to perform analytics on at least 6 gigabytes per second or 21,600 gigabytes per hour - the equivalent of all the Web pages on the Internet.
The Marine Institute of Ireland plans to use System S to better understand fragile marine ecosystems. As a core component of this collaboration, a real-time distributed stream analytical fabric for environmental monitoring and management is under development. Acting on large volumes of underwater acoustic data and processing it in real-time, the Institute extracts useful information such as species identification of marine life, population count and location. Future extensions to the analytics platform, using acoustic data sampled at alternate frequencies might allow correlation and modeling in areas such as weather and marine traffic, extending the value of the recently announced SmartBay project.
TD Securities and IBM collaborated to develop a revolutionary prototype of the world's fastest automated options trading system using System S. With this system, scientists at IBM collaborated with TD Securities to achieve a 21 times performance improvement on the volume of data consumed by financial trading systems.
IBM and the University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT) are using testing System S to help doctors detect subtle changes in the condition of critically ill premature babies. The software ingests a constant stream of biomedical data, such as heart rate and respiration, along with clinical information about the babies. Monitoring "preemies" as a patient group is especially important as certain life-threatening conditions such as infection may be detected up to 24 hours in advance by observing changes in physiological data streams. The type of information that will come out of the use of System S is not available today. Currently, physicians monitoring preemies rely on a paper-based process that involves manually looking at the readings from various monitors and getting feedback from the nurses providing care.
For more information about IBM's System S software, visit http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/infosphere/streams/. System S is available as a part of the InfoSphere Product line.
