N1005 IBM Research: ibm research-Austin

Accelerating Watson’s Performance with OpenPOWER

<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://asmarterplanet.com/files/2014/02/rob_high.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://asmarterplanet.com/files/2014/02/rob_high.jpg" /></a></div><i><span style="font-family: "helvneue light for ibm" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.0pt;">Editor's note: This article is by Rob High, IBM Fellow and IBM Watson CTO.</span></i> <br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "helvneue light for ibm" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">It’s only been four years since Watson played and won <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Jeopardy!</i>against the very best players with a machine roughly the size of a master bedroom. Since then, we’ve completely re-engineered Watson’s appearance and abilities, delivering it via the cloud and incorporating revolutionary features that span language, speech, vision and data insights. <br /><br />With more than 30 cognitive services available via the </span><span style="font-family: "helvneue light for ibm" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.0pt;"><a href="http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercloud/"><span style="color: #0082bf; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Watson Developer Cloud</span></a></span><span style="font-family: "helvneue light for ibm" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">on </span><span style="font-family: "helvneue light for ibm" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.0pt;"><a href="http://www.ibm.com/cloud-computing/bluemix/"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Bluemix</span></a></span><span style="font-family: "helvneue light for ibm" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, we're bridging the gap between technology and today’s leading industries, accelerating how doctors, lawyers, marketers and other professionals analyze high volumes of data and glean critical insights to improve decision-making and to generate new ideas.</span><br /><a name="more"></a><span style="font-family: "helvneue light for ibm" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br />Watson’s ability to recognize patterns of text, speech and vision that convey meaning, to understand complex questions through natural language processing, and to continually learn, unlocks the potential of unstructured data across a multitude of industries and disciplines. Watson’s speed and efficiency have always hinged on the quality of its large scale machine learning algorithms. <br /><br />Today, at IBM and OpenPOWER’s Accelerating Innovation event in Austin, we previewed the next iteration of our cognitive computing system architecture, integrating the NVIDIA Tesla Accelerated Computing Platform into Watson’s core technologies. The incorporation of NVIDIA flagship Tesla K80 GPU accelerators – coupled with the Watson’s POWER-based architecture – accelerates Watson’s retrieve and rank capabilities to 1.7x of its normal speed. This fuels our drive to further improve our cost-performance of Watson's cloud-based services. <br /><br />For example, if a call center agent is responding to an individual’s health and insurance query, the agent will be able to leverage Watson’s natural language processing technology to obtain an answer in real-time even faster and cheaper than before.<br /><br />In addition to bolstering response time, the GPU acceleration also increases Watson’s processing power to 10x its prior performance. Watson often requires a lot of compute power and time to digest, annotate and index large quantities of data to prepare it to perform its cognitive tasks. NVIDIA’s Tesla GPUs will accelerate the time it takes the cognitive computing system to process this information to enable it to interact in natural language.<br /><br />The combination of IBM POWER architecture and NVIDIA’s Tesla Platform will also facilitate the expansion of Watson’s deep learning functionality. Hardware acceleration is integral to Watson’s ability to deeply reason about vision and speech recognition – in a short period of time.<br /><br /><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJhkVr1pTBGmDUzkd9UuyZOWIyOxG2s-YvEPK4IV0gmUAL06OaDKgYepgnXEMpijokYtW4IZQEybJTtFP84lW4PDNgrDOGqDro7-AJ90HObcjMqNIFlCyrizJiHb1fTkouuwkXSzTkiKU/s1600/WatsonGPU.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJhkVr1pTBGmDUzkd9UuyZOWIyOxG2s-YvEPK4IV0gmUAL06OaDKgYepgnXEMpijokYtW4IZQEybJTtFP84lW4PDNgrDOGqDro7-AJ90HObcjMqNIFlCyrizJiHb1fTkouuwkXSzTkiKU/s320/WatsonGPU.jpg" width="239" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Watson on Ope<span style="font-family: "helvneue light for ibm" , sans-serif;">nPOWER at </span>Accelerator Day</td></tr></tbody></table>This collaborative effort is a result of the </span><span style="font-family: "helvneue light for ibm" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.0pt;"><a href="http://openpowerfoundation.org/"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">OpenPOWER Foundation</span></a></span><span style="font-family: "helvneue light for ibm" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, a global open development organization formed by IBM, Google, NVIDIA, Mellanox and Tyan to facilitate innovation on POWER architecture and develop collaborative hardware and software solutions.<br /><br />By accelerating Watson’s response time and training capabilities through open innovation, OpenPOWER is also propelling our Watson Ecosystem – which has grown to more than <span style="font-family: "helvneue light for ibm" , sans-serif;">77</span>,000 developers globally and</span><span style="font-family: "helvneue light for ibm" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="font-family: "helvneue light for ibm" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-family: "helvneue light for ibm" , sans-serif;">350</span>startups and established businesses currently commercializing their products and services embedded with sophisticated cognitive computing APIs.<br /><br />Today’s demo in Austin was simply an appetizer, a preview of one of several Watson capabilities that we’re collectively accelerating. We will continue to optimize Watson services with OpenPOWER’s advanced architecture to give developers and clients a competitive edge in today’s cognitive era.<br /><br />One innovation at a time.<br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" /> </span><span style="font-family: "helvneue light for ibm" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.0pt;"></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "helvneue light for ibm" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"><br /></span></span></div>

Editor's note: This article is by Rob High, IBM Fellow and IBM Watson CTO. It’s only been four years since Watson played and won Jeopar...

Profile of a scientist: Rei Odaira

5:00 AM N1000 0

<br /><div class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 106%;"></span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 106%;">Location: IBM Research-Austin</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 106%;">Nationality: Japanese</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 106%;">Focus: High Performance Computing Compiler Optimization</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsyJ4fjSmzpLbTcys7x4LboM_BCdV6l3-3x4CmD9W2y7Vis5GDAb2m7fkjuMHQy40LO8qe7c7b2YRiUhegymOtszFLG__7AyVliWVjGMoYQJYTH1fDdl7JGL7ZQms9H4zM_6Bo3PqZfLVe/s1600/rei_odaira.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsyJ4fjSmzpLbTcys7x4LboM_BCdV6l3-3x4CmD9W2y7Vis5GDAb2m7fkjuMHQy40LO8qe7c7b2YRiUhegymOtszFLG__7AyVliWVjGMoYQJYTH1fDdl7JGL7ZQms9H4zM_6Bo3PqZfLVe/s1600/rei_odaira.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 106%;">Compilers turn a computer’s coding into executable programs. So, the faster a compiler works, the faster a program runs. Compilers, though, have to work within a computer’s constraints. The number of processors, the amount of memory, even the programming language all influence a compiler’s effectiveness. So, engineers like Rei Odaira develop ways to optimize them.</span><br /><a name="more"></a><br /><br /><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 106%;">Rei joined IBM Research-Tokyo 10 years ago to optimize System z mainframe compilers. The team he joined invented the technology in the mid-1990s, for the High Performance <a href="http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/fortran/">FORTRAN</a>compilers. And in 1995 – while Rei was still at the University of Tokyo – they built the Java virtual machine, and the Java just-in-time compiler, that has been embedded in every IBM software product that uses Java, including WebSphere. Rei took notice of the world-famous work happening only 20 kilometers away from campus, and wanted to be a part of the group.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 106%;">“College students at the University of Tokyo cannot declare a major for the first two years of school. They can only choose ‘sciences’ or ‘liberal arts’ as a general areas of study. I originally wanted to study mathematics and physics when I entered the university. But this was also the time of the Internet boom of mid- and late-1990s. So, I began learning about things like Linux. And also, IBM’s just-in-time compiler was the fastest in the world at that time. And because that team was in Tokyo, my classmates and I knew their work very well – from papers they published, to conferences they attended.</span><br /><br /></div><table align="left" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="MsoNormalTable" style="border-collapse: collapse; margin-left: 6.75pt; margin-right: 6.75pt; mso-padding-alt: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-table-anchor-horizontal: margin; mso-table-anchor-vertical: paragraph; mso-table-layout-alt: fixed; mso-table-left: left; mso-table-lspace: 9.0pt; mso-table-rspace: 9.0pt; mso-table-top: 1.9pt;"> <tbody><tr style="mso-yfti-firstrow: yes; mso-yfti-irow: 0; mso-yfti-lastrow: yes;">  <td style="border: solid white 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: solid white .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 162.5pt;" valign="top" width="217"><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-element-anchor-horizontal: margin; mso-element-anchor-vertical: paragraph; mso-element-frame-hspace: 9.0pt; mso-element-top: 1.9pt; mso-element-wrap: around; mso-element: frame; mso-height-rule: exactly;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: grey; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 106%;">Power 8’s greatest advancement is in its CAPI interface. It   allows others to build new systems on top of Power 8. For example, CAPI can   be made to quickly access and analyze unstructured NoSQL data stored in Flash   memory.</span></i><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 106%;"> – <a href="http://ibmresearchnews.blogspot.com/2014/05/making-power-open-to-enterprising-masses.html">Making   Power Open to the Enterprising Masses</a></span></div></td> </tr></tbody></table><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 106%;">“My first job [at IBM] was to optimize the compiler on the System z mainframe. Compiler optimization is all about getting as much performance out of hardware as possible. It was a perfect match for my computer science background, and love for working on hardware.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 106%;">System z, though, is an interesting challenge. It has 16 registers (places on a computer processor where data is kept), while other machine architectures, like our Power systems have several more (so, have more ways to spread out and execute a workload). But our algorithms improved z’s middleware efficiency by 3 percent – a major breakthrough in 2005, considering how fast the mainframe already was, and the limited ways to optimize it.</span><br /><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 106%;"><br /></span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 106%;">On OpenPower and moving to the US</span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 106%;">“I moved to Austin in January of this year to manage a systems team working on the Power system’s Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface (<a href="http://www-304.ibm.com/webapp/set2/sas/f/capi/home.html">CAPI</a>) Flash. The opportunity actually came up last April, when one of my managers – while on a visit to the Austin lab – was asked about who could manage their local team working on <a href="http://openpowerfoundation.org/">OpenPower</a>optimization. And my name came up. My family thought it was a great opportunity, so it wasn’t a hard decision to say ‘yes.’</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 106%;">“Now in Austin, my scope broadened from System z compilers and run time programs like Java and Ruby, to developing ways to exploit CAPI Flash – an accelerator that can access and analyze unstructured data stored in Flash memory. This means it can optimize workloads on the Bluemix cloud platform and the SoftLayer infrastructure it runs on, to do things like process genome sequence data in a few hours, versus the day or so it takes, now.”</span><br /><br /><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 106%;">Tips on the transition from school to industry</span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div align="right"><table align="right" border="1" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="MsoTableGrid" style="border-collapse: collapse; border: none; margin-left: 6.75pt; margin-right: 6.75pt; mso-border-alt: solid white .5pt; mso-border-insideh-themecolor: background1; mso-border-insideh: .5pt solid white; mso-border-insidev-themecolor: background1; mso-border-insidev: .5pt solid white; mso-border-themecolor: background1; mso-padding-alt: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-table-anchor-horizontal: column; mso-table-anchor-vertical: paragraph; mso-table-left: right; mso-table-lspace: 9.0pt; mso-table-overlap: never; mso-table-rspace: 9.0pt; mso-table-top: .05pt; mso-yfti-tbllook: 1184;"> <tbody><tr style="mso-yfti-firstrow: yes; mso-yfti-irow: 0; mso-yfti-lastrow: yes;">  <td style="border: solid white 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: solid white .5pt; mso-border-themecolor: background1; mso-border-themecolor: background1; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 2.25in;" valign="top" width="216"> <br /><div style="mso-element-anchor-horizontal: column; mso-element-anchor-vertical: paragraph; mso-element-frame-hspace: 9.0pt; mso-element-left: right; mso-element-top: .05pt; mso-element-wrap: around; mso-element: frame; mso-height-rule: exactly;"><table align="right" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" hspace="0" vspace="0"> <tbody><tr><td align="left" style="padding-bottom: 0in; padding-left: 9.0pt; padding-right: 9.0pt; padding-top: 0in;" valign="top"><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-element-anchor-horizontal: column; mso-element-anchor-vertical: paragraph; mso-element-frame-hspace: 9.0pt; mso-element-left: right; mso-element-top: .05pt; mso-element-wrap: around; mso-element: frame; mso-height-rule: exactly;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif;">Other career highlights</span></b></div><br /><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif;">14 patents filed</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif;">7 patents issued </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif;"><a href="http://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/files/jp-ODAIRA/PPoPP2014_RubyGILHTM.pdf">Eliminating Global Interpreter Locks in Ruby through Hardware Transactional Memory</a> – PPoP</span><br /><br /><span style="color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; mso-bidi-font-family: Helv; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><a href="http://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/files/jp-ODAIRA/ASPLOS2012_ContinuousObjectAccessProfiling.pdf">Continuous   Object Access Profiling and Optimizations to Overcome the Memory Wall and   Bloat</a> – ASPLOS</span><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif;"> </span><br /><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif;"><br /></span></td> </tr></tbody></table></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-element-anchor-horizontal: column; mso-element-anchor-vertical: paragraph; mso-element-frame-hspace: 9.0pt; mso-element-left: right; mso-element-top: .05pt; mso-element-wrap: around; mso-element: frame; mso-height-rule: exactly;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: small; line-height: 106%;"></span></div></td> </tr></tbody></table></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 106%;">“University studies give you the skills and knowledge about a topic. Computer architecture and algorithms in my case. Coming to IBM meant picking up new skills, like writing papers and making presentations. And also learning how to contribute to products – something you don’t do in school.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 106%;">“At first, I had these ideas of how to change a product. They didn’t go over too well because it meant implementing a completely new thing, like an algorithm or function, in the development and maintenance of that product. I had to learn how to work in the industry, balancing business needs – and the many parts that come together to make a product work – with how my own ideas could make an impact.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 106%;">“But at IBM you also have plenty of opportunities to partner with academia. I write papers for industry and academic publications. And am a member of, and on the 2015 organizational committee for the International Conference on Principles and Practices of Programming on the Java platform (PPPJ). I was also an external review committee member for Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI) earlier this year, and am now working as an editorial committee member for the Information Processing Society of Japan’s Transaction on Programming.</span><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 106%;">”</span></div>

bluemix fortran ibm research tokyo ibm research-Austin system z Profile of a scientist: Rei Odaira

Location: IBM Research-Austin Nationality: Japanese Focus: High Performance Computing Compiler Optimization Compilers turn a computer’s codi...