Neo4j news from IT Jungle: What To Do With All Those Spare CPWs
One of the most interesting big data-related developments to happen in the IBM Power world lately is the partnership created between Neo Technology and IBM last October.
Neo, if you’re not familiar, is the leading developer of graph databases for big data analytics, and its flagship product, called Neo4j, is being used in hundreds of blue-chip companies such as Wal-Mart, Pitney Bowes, and UBS. Just as Facebook uses a graph to connect systems, Neo4j can quickly find similarities among billions of connected entities, and the software runs at the heart of a variety of applications in fraud detection, master data management, and real-time recommendation generation.
The cool thing about Neo and IBM teaming up is the capability to solve truly massive graph problems on Power8 servers. The companies did the work to enable Neo4j to run directly atop the Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface (CAPI) cards that IBM uses to connect co-processors, such as Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) and Graphic Processing Units (GPUs) to the PCI bus. Neo executives say they’re able to access up to 40TB of CAPI-supplied flash memory as if it were main memory, bypassing Linux and the file system in the process (see graphic above).
This enables Neo4j to build and query graph databases that are 10x bigger than anything possible on X64, according to Neo–graphs measured in the hundreds of billions to trillions of nodes. Fraud detection, bioinformatics, and analytics for the Internet of Things (IoT) are the top workloads expected to be enabled by this technology, which will become available later this year.
Keywords: IBM Power 8 • Internet of Things