A platform for eXtreme Analytics

With the rapid increase in the volume of data that enterprises are producing, enterprises are adopting large-scale data processing platforms such as Hadoop® to store, manage, and run deep analytics to gain actionable insights from their “big data.” At IBM Research - Almaden, we have been helping enterprise customers build solutions exploiting data-intensive analytics. Our deep experience with actual users has led to an extensive understanding of the platform requirements needed to support these solutions, and our goal is to provide a powerful analytics platform, which we call eXtreme Analytics Platform (XAP), that can be used to create solutions for customer problems that have not been economically feasible to solve until now. XAP provides Jaql [i.e., JavaScript® Object Notation (JSON) query language, a scripting language to specify data flows, tools, and techniques to optimize the runtime execution of these flows], an improved task scheduler, connectors to data warehouses, and libraries for advanced analytics. Many of these technologies have been transferred to the IBM InfoSphere BigInsights™ product. In this paper, we describe the overall design principles and technology of XAP.