IBM Canada is delivering more of its trademark blue buzz today as the technology giant is contributing a landmark $65 million of computers and software to Western University, which will exponentially enhance the collaborative efforts already underway between the two partners, as part of a recently announced $210 million research and development innovation network.
To watch Mark Daley, Principal Investigator, Brain and Mind Institute, explain the research benefits of IBM’s contribution, click here.
Just last week, Western, IBM, the Governments of Canada and Ontario and the University of Toronto announced the IBM Canada Research and Development Centre (https://communications.uwo.ca/media/ibmcloud/), an Ontario-based high performance and cloud computing network charged with storing and exploring the limitless amount of “big data” that is generated 24 hours a day* from everything from functional MRI scans and watershed monitors to seismic readings and wind patterns.
IBM’s gift to Western provides researchers and scientists with the leading-edge research tools, in the form of analytics software, necessary to fully utilize and accelerate the processing capabilities of the revolutionary hardware to drive the research cloud platform the university will also receive as one of the primary nodes for the newly formed Southern Ontario Smart Computing and Innovation Platform (SOSCIP).
IBM business analytics software will help Western researchers and scientists extract relevant data, analyze it and create pertinent reports through a web-based, service-oriented architecture while the IBM DB2 database software will offer the university a virtual computer lab for multiple workloads on distributed systems, producing unparalleled efficiencies for users and storage.
“This remarkable investment will provide Western researchers with the tools to explore the infinite possibilities of agile and cloud computing,” says Western President Amit Chakma. “IBM is recognized as a world leader in technological innovation and infusing their intelligence into our systems will no doubt produce exciting results.”
“Together, we are supporting fundamental research and developing new techniques to increase the speed of high performance computing systems to better capture Internet-scale data and apply analytics to tackle critical challenges with our cities, water, energy, and healthcare systems,” says John Lutz, President, IBM Canada.
* IBM estimates 2.5 quintillion bytes of data is created every day. This is big data.
Tags
