IBM Rolls Out Big Customers At Think 2019 Using AI, ML, DL On Power Systems Posted on : Mar 01 - 2019

There was a tremendous amount of news delivered at this year's IBM THINK 2019, which I personally attended along with my senior storage analyst colleague Steve McDowell. One thing that impressed me, which didn’t get much press, was the number of rich conversations from IBM customers on how they were using Power Systems to help their AI, ML and DL workflows. It's hard enough to get customers to talk about much of anything on stage with detail, and I was impressed at the depth and breadth of those discussions. Let’s take a closer look.

JP Morgan Chase & Co

JPMorgan Chase & Co was one of the companies on site discussing its experience with IBM’s Power Systems. JPMC manages $2.6 Trillion in assets and operates in 100 countries. Executive Director Elenita Elinon spent time on stage talking about how the bank utilizes Machine Learning on IBM’s Power Systems, saying that it chose IBM’s systems because they work better on larger datasets like security, fraud, regulatory, and rogue trades. Power’s scale-up capabilities are unparalleled and work the best right now with accelerators given its flexibility and memory coherency capabilities.

Morgan Stanley

Morgan Stanley was another customer that showcased its work with IBM Power Systems at the event. The financial institution says that IBM Power Systems’ computing power and AI-readiness is enabling the organization to explore new AI/ML use cases in finance, with the overall goal of increased efficiency and alignment with customer needs. For example, Morgan Stanley’s Marcelo Labre elaborated at THINK 2019 on how his organization is utilizing AI to challenge outdated risk models. Using AI to improve risk models is a common theme I hear over and over in the industry. You truly need big data to do this well and Power fits the bill. IBM's Thomas Harrer, captured the action well here in a tweet.

Fannie Mae

Also in attendance were representatives from mortgage loan company Fannie Mae. The company says it relies on high-performance computing for the risk management of its massive mortgage portfolio (which totals roughly $3.2 trillion). Fannie Mae shared at THINK 2019 that it has built a heterogeneous computing framework on IBM’s Power Systems that purportedly reduces its infrastructure costs by as much as 90%. Heterogeneous computing is what Power was made for, and I call it the “Swiss Army knife of acceleration” given its highest bandwidth and I/O flexibility with coherent and non-coherent options. View More