IBM Claims Breakthrough Energy-Efficient Algorithm

Posted by kdawson on Friday February 26, 2010 @01:52AM from the sensible-consistency dept.

jitendraharlalka sends news of a claimed algorithmic breakthrough by IBM, though from the scant technical detail provided it's hard to tell exactly how important the development might be. IBM apparently presented its results yesterday at the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics conference in Seattle. The breathless press release begins: "IBM Research today unveiled a breakthrough method based on a mathematical algorithm that reduces the computational complexity, costs, and energy usage for analyzing the quality of massive amounts of data by two orders of magnitude. This new method will greatly help enterprises extract and use the data more quickly and efficiently to develop more accurate and predictive models. In a record-breaking experiment, IBM researchers used the fourth most powerful supercomputer in the world... to validate nine terabytes of data... in less than 20 minutes, without compromising accuracy. Ordinarily, using the same system, this would take more than a day. Additionally, the process used just one percent of the energy that would typically be required."

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not news for nerds: there's no detail! by drinkypoo · 2010-02-26 02:03 · Score: 0, Redundant

No explanation of how these two orders of magnitude of improvement were achieved. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.

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"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
What was the algorithm? by spiffmastercow · 2010-02-26 02:42 · Score: 1, Redundant

What was the algorithm? For all I know (having not read TFA), it could be that they replaced bubble sort with quicksort.