IBMs’ z13 platform has the potential to revolutionize the industry with its ability to combine transaction processing and analytics. We’re not talking a small amount of data. We’re talking analytics on healthcare data, genomic data, and global climate modeling. Big Data with high performance.

“What would take a week to run on Intel takes an hour on the z13,” Donna Dillenberger, IBM fellow at IBM Research, told theCUBE during IBM Edge2015.

 The benefits of high-performance computing

The advancement propels z13 into the high-performance computing space. “We have the fastest microprocessor in the industry,” said Dillenberger. “Coupled with 10 terabytes of memory, you don’t always have to be doing I/O to get to your data. You can do those calculations in the memory space and have a very powerful high-performance computer.”

The challenge, according to Gustavo Stolovitsky, IBM’s program director for Translated Systems Biology and Nanobiotechnology, who also joined theCUBE, is to learn how to extract the Big Data. Stolovitsky believes that healthcare and other industries need “more eyes” on Big Data sets to use it for public good.

IBM’s DREAM Challenge

IBM’s DREAM Challenges open science competition follows this collaborative principle. “We curate big data sets from different sources and make it available for everybody to address the question that we pose,” Stolovitsky explained.

One recent question: “Can an algorithm look at clinical data from a patient affected by ALS and predict its progression?”

“We want to empower the physician to be able to answer these kinds of questions,” said Stolovitsky, who heads DREAM Challenges. “Taking advantage of all the data out there, facilitating an algorithm that does that, is very much necessary in ALS and other diseases.”

“We would like to help people be as healthy as possible,” said Dillenberger. “To help with cancer would be an immense achievement. That is another health challenge that I would like to see progress on.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of IBM Edge2015.