The Hartree Centre, part of the Science and Technologies Facilities Council (STFC), has created a big data hub in an ongoing research partnership with IBM that aims to help companies tackle complex real-world problems.
The centre, based at the Daresbury Laboratory in North West England, will use IBM’s Infosphere BigInsights platform. The platform is based on Apache Hadoop, an open-source technology designed for analysis of big volumes of data. This will allow companies to come to the centre and solve their business and technological issues.
Other tools to be used include IBM’s Infosphere Streams and Watson Explorer as well as the IBM Business Analytics for predictive analytics, reporting and visualisation.
Lee Hannis, business development manager at Hartree Centre, STFC, said: "We have a great track record of delivering high performance computing services to industry developing algorithms and complex models that are used to create new products faster and cheaper.
"This collaboration in data analytics provides an obvious and exciting extension opening up our skills to a wider audience of businesses. This toolset will allow any company to accelerate their understanding of data and its value within their business."
Democrata, a UK construction company, is already using analytics at Hartree Centre to automate environmental impact tests and predict risk.
Dixit Shah, Big Data and Analytics Leader, IBM UK and Ireland, said: "As we see the ‘Internet of Things’ evolving with many more connected devices, we believe Big Data Analytics technology can be applied to developing new products and services for other areas. The work we have done with STFC is a great example of this."
