Chicago-based company, Ocient, is making waves in the world of big data with its hyperscale data warehouse technology. Ocient announced a series of new capabilities that enhance its data platform for geospatial data analytics, machine learning (ML), and artificial intelligence (AI). The new OcientGeo feature, integrated within Ocient’s Hyperscale Data Warehouse product, offers an extensive library of geospatial functions and a globally optimized spatial index. With OcientGeo, companies can now process massive volumes of historical and real-time geospatial data to generate valuable insights. Furthermore, integrated ML tools enable businesses to accelerate their geospatial AI initiatives.
Unlike other organizations, Ocient does not rely on GPUs to handle hyperscale data requirements. Instead, the company harnesses highly optimized storage and processing techniques. According to Ocient CEO Chris Gladwin, “Our focus is hyperscale workloads, and I would say the average number of elements that are looked at in an average Ocient query, whether it’s SQL, machine learning, or geospatial, is on the order of probably an average of a trillion things.”
The key to Ocient’s success lies in its extreme level of parallelization. Gladwin explains that the computational operations in a CPU are not the bottleneck; instead, the challenge lies in compute density and throughput across the computing stack, including storage and memory. Ocient has developed technology to optimize memory and fast solid-state drive (SSD) based data storage systems, which differentiates them from others in the industry.
OcientML and OcientGeo: Expanding the Hyperscale Data Warehouse
Ocient’s data warehouse began with SQL data queries but has evolved to support ML and geospatial capabilities. The same architecture that enables fast analytics queries on massive data sets now powers OcientML and OcientGeo. OcientML allows customers to perform machine learning on datasets with billions, hundreds of billions, or even trillions of data points. It offers hyperscale performance, real-time analytics, and data loading at a level of price performance that surpasses alternatives. OcientML also simplifies operations by managing SQL and ML in one system and enables increased model accuracy and faster iteration by eliminating data movement steps.
OcientGeo, on the other hand, enables geospatial queries, analysis, and functions on massive datasets directly within the Ocient platform. It eliminates the need to extract large amounts of data, allowing queries and analyses involving trillions of data points to be performed in seconds at a massive scale.
Gladwin states, “We still are kind of beginning that journey of enabling all these new uses that only can be enabled by making the price and performance of hyperscale analytics 10 times or more better.”
