IBM has announced availability of System S software that enables massive amounts of data to be analyzed in real time.

System S is based on the SPADE programming language. SPADE, short for "Stream Processing Application Declarative Engine", is a programming language and a compilation infrastructure specifically built for streaming systems. It is designed to facilitate the programming of large streaming applications, as well as their efficient and effective mapping to a wide variety of target architectures, including clusters, multicore architectures, and processors such as the multicore Cell processor. The SPADE programming language allows stream processing applications to be written with the finest granularity of operators that is meaningful to the application, and the SPADE compiler appropriately fuses operators and generates a stream processing graph to be run on the Stream Processing Core of System S.

At the same time, IBM also announced the opening of the IBM European Stream Computing Center, headquartered in Dublin, Ireland that will serve as a hub of research, customer support and advanced testing for European clients interested in stream computing. Finally, IBM is making System S trial code available at no cost to help clients better understand the software's capabilities and how they can take advantage of it for their business. This trial code includes developer tools, adapters, and software to test applications.

System S is built for perpetual analytics utilizing a new streaming architecture and mathematical algorithms to create a forward-looking analysis of data from any source, narrowing down precisely what people are looking for and continuously refining the answer as additional data is made available.

For example, System S can analyze hundreds or thousands of simultaneous data streams -- stock prices, retail sales, weather reports, etc. -- and deliver nearly instantaneous analysis to business leaders who need to make split-second decisions. The software can help all organizations that need to react to changing conditions in real time, such as government and law enforcement agencies, financial institutions, retailers, transportation companies, healthcare organizations, and more.

Traditional computing models retrospectively analyze stored data and can not continuously process massive amounts of incoming data streams that affect critical decision-making. System S is designed to help clients become more "real-world aware," seeing and responding to changes across complex systems.