The company plans to demonstrate the system, called System S, at a conference of Wall Street technology managers Tuesday. The announcement, analysts say, is a significant step in the commercialization of the emerging technology of stream computing.
Early this month Google acquired PeakStream, a start-up in stream computing, and industry analysts say its software could help Google improve its video search functions. Stream computing is an effort to deal with two issues: the need for faster data handling and analysis in business and science, and the growing flood of information in digital form, including Web sites, blogs, e-mail, video and news clips, telephone conversations, transaction data and electronic sensors.
The conventional approach to computer analytics and data mining is to collect data, store it in a database program and then search the database for patterns or ask it questions. It is an effective approach, but also tightly structured and often time-consuming. In stream computing, advanced software algorithms analyze the data as it streams in. Text, voice and image-recognition technology, for example, can be used to determine that some data is more relevant to a particular problem than others. The priority data is then shuttled off into a program tailored to work on complex, fast-changing problems like tracking an epidemic and predicting its spread, or culling data from electronic sensors in a computer chip plant to quickly correct flaws in manufacturing.