Big data: 3 frameworks for enterprise insights
In September 2022, a mid-sized retailer with 200 stores ran a big data project on a cloud data warehouse and found that its inventory turnover improved by 14 percent within...
Cloud & Data
McKinsey tech consulting, supercomputing shift, IBM Octo acquisition, TfL big data, NASA space services, and Google TPU v4.
Supercomputing shifts to AI amid exascale race
A supercomputer is a machine engineered to deliver the highest possible floating-point throughput, measured in FLOPS. The TOP500 project has ranked installations by their LINPACK benchmark score since 1993, and...
What Happened to IBM's HPC Expertise After Roadrunner
IBM permanently decommissioned the Roadrunner supercomputer at Los Alamos National Laboratory on March 31, 2013. The machine had been the first to break the petaflop barrier, reaching 1.026 petaflops in...
What Early Adopters of Workplace Tech Actually Get Right
In the workplace, an early adopter is not the person who queues for a new iPhone. Everett Rogers mapped the categories in his 1962 book Diffusion of Innovations, but enterprise...
Matter smart home adoption lags mid-2020s promise
In November 2022, the Connectivity Standards Alliance launched the Matter smart home interoperability standard, backed by Amazon, Apple, Google, and Samsung SmartThings. The promise was straightforward: a light bulb from...
TalkTalk Data Monitoring Platform Targets Business Customers
UK telecoms provider TalkTalk has introduced a data monitoring and analytics platform for its business and wholesale customers. The platform gives those clients real-time visibility into network performance, traffic patterns,...
Google Claims Quantum Supremacy; IBM Disputes the Benchmark
In October 2019, Google published a paper in the journal Nature claiming that its 53-qubit Sycamore processor had achieved quantum supremacy. The claim rested on a single computation: a random...
McKinsey built a $6B tech consulting empire
McKinsey & Company, the global management consultancy founded in 1926, has reshaped itself into a digital consulting force that competes directly with Accenture and Deloitte Digital. Through a string of...
IoT logistics: RFID, GPS sensors drive real-time tracking
The Internet of Things in logistics means attaching RFID tags, GPS units, or environmental monitors to physical assets and feeding that data into a system that operators and customers can...
Google TPU v4 tops Nvidia A100 in MLPerf tests
In 2021 and 2022, Google showed that a pod of 4096 custom TPU v4 chips could train machine learning models faster than a comparable system built with Nvidia's A100 GPUs....
NASA shifts to buying space services from firms
In 2011, NASA had no way to get its own astronauts to the International Space Station. The Space Shuttle had retired, and the agency was buying seats on Russia's Soyuz...
How Transport for London Uses Big Data to Run the City
Transport for London runs one of the world's most data-intensive public transport networks. Every day, the system logs millions of taps from Oyster cards and contactless bank cards, records Wi-Fi...
