IBM is working with Continuum Analytics to offer the latter’s Anaconda open data science platform as part of IBM's Cognitive Systems. Anaconda will also integrate with IBM's PowerAI software for machine learning and deep learning.

IBM Cognitive Systems are based on the company’s own Power8 processors, which uses Nvidia’s high-speed NVLink interface to work in conjunction with Nvidia’s Tesla Pascal P100 GPU accelerators. The combination is designed to give a performance boost to deep learning and analytics applications.

Anaconda is a platform upon which enterprise customers can build and run applications that make use of deep learning. It supports large-scale data processing, predictive analytics, and scientific computing to simplify package management and deployment.

PowerAI, meanwhile, is designed to accelerate enterprise adoption of open-source machine and deep learning frameworks used to build cognitive applications. IBM said a goal with PowerAI is to reduce the complexity of deploying these open source frameworks for enterprises.

Anaconda is precisely the type of platform that IBM developed IBM Cognitive Systems and PowerAI to support. SDxCentral asked IBM if Cognitive Systems supports others; the company was unable to provide a definitive response by press time.

Bob Picciano, senior vice president of IBM Cognitive Systems, said in a statement, “Anaconda on IBM Cognitive Systems empowers developers and data scientists to build and deploy deep learning applications that are ready to scale.”

Several of the world’s biggest companies, including Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Salesforce, recently began making deep learning capabilities available to their enterprise customers. And companies like IBM and Continuum Analytics are rushing to develop open-source basic technology and tools to support those efforts.