IBM, which celebrated its 100th anniversary last month, has collaborated with Korea Electric Power Company (KEPCO) to build the Total Operations Center at the Jeju Smart Grid Test-Bed Demonstration Complex.  The complex is the largest smart grid community in the world and caters 160 companies and 11 consortia members doing smart grid research and testing.

“Operating the smart grid involves implementing a flexible management strategy that takes into consideration the various application standards, development speeds and requirements of that particular region,” said KEPCO deputy general manager Park Jong-man.

“This collaboration with IBM allows KEPCO to create a model based on international standards, such as CIM that can be used to infuse intelligence into any smart grid infrastructure.”

In this partnership, IBM provided consulting services and software development to create the  integrated energy management system for the center; they also helped in designing the IEC CIM guidelines.

“This collaboration with KEPCO will not only improve operational efficiencies at the complex but will also help drive the development of international standard technologies in the Korean smart grid market allowing domestic businesses to operate and compete at an international level,” said Guido Bartels, general manager of the Energy and Utilities industry at IBM and chairman of the Global Smart Grid Federation.

Watson Technology

In other news, IBM is working on a project to utilized its Watson technology to aid the company’s sales people in selling IBM hardware, software and services.

At a recent luncheon in New York City to discuss IBM’s Smart Computing strategy, IBM Vice President and CIO Jeanette Horan said IBM is doing several things to enable its staff to make better use of unstructured data, and one of them is to use the company’s Watson technology. Watson is the computer system IBM designed that won a “Jeopardy!” challenge against some of the game show’s biggest winners. IBM calls Watson a workload-optimized system designed for complex analytics, made possible by integrating massively parallel Power7 processors and IBM’s DeepQA question answering software. Watson applies advanced natural language processing, information retrieval, knowledge representation and reasoning, and machine learning technologies to answering questions.

The goal of the said project is to showcase to customers how IBM can successfully leverage its own product as evidence on what it can also do for them.

Faster Memory Chip

Another big development for IBM is its recent discovery of a new universal memory chip.  Compared to the contemporary flash memory, the new chip can record data 100 times faster, is non-volatile and has incredible storage.

Phase change memory is an alloy of various unnamed elements. It leverages with resistance by changing from crystal phase to an amorous phase through electrical voltage or pulses application in a range of one to zero (basic bits for digital memory systems), and with a latency of 10 milliseconds. The crystalline phase has low resistance while the amorphous phase has higher, enabling for multiple bits to be stored in a single memory cell. IBM managed to put 4 bits in one cell, pretty much like putting 4 people in a single family home, subsequently decreasing the cost per person.

The chip is predicted to be a game changer in the computing industry by 2016—that’s if IBM can successfully mass produce the universal memory chip.  Until then, we will have to settle with current flash storage offerings.