Communications of the ACM
What Cars Did for Today's World, Data May Do for Tomorrow's
General Electric analyzes data from millions of miles of flights to identify possible jet engine defects 2,000 times faster than it could previously.
Credit: Reuters
The acquisition and processing of digital information has become the dominant industrial ecosystem, which calls for new and improved ways of collecting, shipping, and processing data. An example of this ecosystem is General Electric's (GE) announcement of a "data lake" technique for analyzing sensor information from industrial equipment in systems such as railroads, airlines, hospitals, and utilities. GE says this method enabled it to examine data from 3.4 million miles of flights by 24 airlines using GE jet engines for the last three months, and determine possible defects 2,000 times as fast as it could previously.
In a similar vein is a method for engineering fiber-optic cable that University of California, San Diego researchers are using to make digital networks operate 10 times faster. California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology director Larry Smarr says the goal of this effort is to accommodate the massive volumes of data generated by increasingly advanced technology, and he anticipates commercial networks eventually running 10,000 times faster than they are now.
Data computation also is undergoing an evolution through initiatives such as Databricks, a startup that employs new types of software for rapid data analysis on a rental basis.
From The New York Times
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