The massive rise in business-critical information flowing through information technology systems today has put enormous pressure on enterprise data centers to keep up with demand. With chips finally reaching physical limitations in processing power and no longer governed by Moore’s law, companies such as IBM Corp. are increasingly joining forces with other industry leaders to find new solutions.

“We believe that system-level optimization and innovation are what’s going to bring the price performance advantage in the future,” said Linton Ward (pictured left), chief engineer of big data and analytics Power Systems at IBM. “Traditional CMOS [Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor] scaling doesn’t really bring us there by itself, but partnership does.”

Ward appeared on the set of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile live-streaming studio. He was joined by Asad Mahmood (pictured right), analytics cloud solutions specialist, federal healthcare, at IBM, and answered questions from hosts Lisa Martin (@Luccazara) and George Gilbert (@ggilbert41) during DataWorks Summit in San Jose, California. They discussed the OpenPOWER Foundation and how IBM is using data to build healthcare solutions. (* Disclosure below.)

Companies form OpenPOWER Foundation

To address concerns about chip capacities, IBM has partnered with four other companies to form the OpenPOWER Foundation, an industry consortium designed to rethink approaches to data center technology. Ward told theCUBE that getting fast data closer to computing functions is a major goal.

“NAND flash [memory] and other non-volatile technologies for fast data are where the innovation is happening right now,” Ward said. “Over time, we will continue to collect more and more data, and it will continue to put pressure on technologies.”

One of IBM’s partners in the foundation is Nvidia Corp. The graphics processing systems company has developed for the consortium NVLink, a high-bandwidth interconnect to enable speedier communication between GPU and CPU.

As IBM grapples with data center concerns, the company is using its own tools, such as its Data Science Experience, to build new applications right on the cloud. Mahmood described how he’s developed applications specific to federal healthcare in just this way.

“The applications that I’ve started out building at IBM are all patient-centric,” he said. “The [applications] basically put the level of their data, their symptoms, their diagnosis in their hands alone.”

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE