PowerAI, announced last year by IBM Corp., is geared for companies who might appreciate all that Watson (IBM’s cognitive computing and artificial intelligence supercomputer) has to offer. But they still desire a software toolkit that allows them to build an impressive deep learning framework. They don’t want to do all the work involved in assembling the tools, but they can sure put them to good use once installed.

Speed is still the coin of the realm in this space. Because PowerAI is designed to run on IBM’s top-performing server — the S822LC — the company has a lot of faith that it will deliver the speed that developers expect. So they’ve guaranteed it.

“We’re so confident in Linux and Power Systems running high workloads on Hadoop that we currently have a 3x price-performance guarantee for a Power cluster versus a comparable Intel cluster. Data scientists and data analysts want fast access to the data,” said Steve Roberts (pictured, right), big data solutions manager at IBM Canada.

Roberts visited the set of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio, and spoke with host John Furrier (@furrier) during the recent BigData NYC event in New York City. He was joined by Keshav Ranganathan (pictured, left), senior offering manager of big data and analytics, Power Systems solutions, at IBM. They discussed use case scenarios for PowerAI and recently announced features for developers. (* Disclosure below.)

Packaging key tools to speed process

IBM’s guarantee underscores the high stakes game playing out these days in the race to capture market share in the evolving AI space. By packaging deep learning tools, such as Caffe, TensorFlow and Theano, IBM believes that PowerAI will attract large enterprises eager to adopt its robust training model.

In one use case, the process of loading a large number of data-heavy images and then building a recognition program to train models could take days. “What we’re talking about with PowerAI is to bring that time down to hours,” Ranganathan said. “You can start the installation process, go out for lunch, come back and you have the complete framework ready to go.”

In May, IBM announced new features for PowerAI designed to guide developers in training computer vision AI models and better prepare data sets for machine learning.

“We are delivering a phenomenal platform that takes a user from doing simple statistical modeling all the way to deep learning workloads,” Ranganathan said. And he guarantees it.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of BigData NYC 2017. (* Disclosure: IBM Corp. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither IBM nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE