AI tools for Z

IBM Z and LinuxONE feature state of the art hardware and software capabilities designed to optimize AI at scale alongside your enterprise's most critical workloads and data.

AI on IBM Z and LinuxONE is a large umbrella that covers both server technology as well as numerous IBM and vendor offerings and open-source projects. This includes enhancements such as the IBM Telum on-chip inference accelerator used by IBM z16 and LinuxONE 4 systems.

Software for enterprise AI

AI Toolkit for IBM Z and LinuxONE. Discover the latest AI open-source software, with a delivery experience that's as consistent and trusted as other IBM Z software. The toolkit is anticipated to support popular industry-standard open-source frameworks—such as IBM Z Accelerated for TensorFlow, IBM Z Accelerated for TensorFlow Serving, IBM Z Accelerated for Snap ML and others—so that businesses can start implementing trustworthy AI.
Python AI Toolkit. Access a library of relevant open-source software to support today's AI and machine learning workloads. This enhanced toolkit is a library of open-source Python software to support AI and machine learning workloads that adheres to IBM Security and Privacy by Design practices. Clients can now leverage zIIP-eligible packages with Python AI Toolkit for IBM z/OS and IBM Open Enterprise SDK for Python 3.11 to embed AI into their applications.
AI embedded into real-world apps. Build machine learning models using your platform of choice and quickly deploy those models within transactional applications, while maintaining SLAs.
Accelerate TensorFlow Inference. Bring TensorFlow models trained anywhere and deploy them close to your business-critical applications on IBM Z, leveraging IBM Integrated Accelerator for AI seamlessly.
In-memory computing performance ‐ IBM Z Platform for Apache Spark. Move forward with an in-memory compute engine and analytics run time that supports popular big-data languages such as JavaTM, Scala, Python and R.
Compile .onnx deep learning AI models into shared libaries ‐ IBM Z Deep Learning Compiler. Compile popular compatible AI models into onnx format and run them on IBM Z with minimal dependencies, while also leveraging IBM Integrated Accelerator for AI seamlessly.
Popular open-source tools. Use Anaconda on IBM Z and LinuxONE, and leverage industry-standard packages such as Scikit-learn, NumPy and PyTorch— with cost-effective zCX containers.

IBM Watson Machine Learning for z/OS

The flagship machine learning platform, IBM Watson Machine Learning for z/OS v3.1 is designed exclusively for AI workloads running on z/OS.

This platform offers an array of features that enable businesses to harness the power of AI for their most mission critical applications, such as:

Secure IBM zSystems platform for running machine learning with data in place
Enterprise grade performance and high availability
Flexible choice of machine learning languages
Full lifecycle management of models
User-centric UIs for model development and management, user management, and system administration
Developer-friendly APIs for applications on IBM zSystems

This comprehensive platform enables businesses to leverage the exceptional power of AI while maintaining the security, reliability, and performance of their on-premises infrastructure.

IBM Watson Machine Learning for z/OS v3.1 - Enterprise Edition builds upon the success of its predecessor, v2.4, and represents a complete end-to-end machine learning model development, deployment, serving, and lifecycle management platform. Companies can benefit from the data and transactional gravity of the IBM Z platform, enabling them to develop and deploy AI models in close proximity to their mission-critical transactional workloads, and then infuse the models with Z application native interfaces. The proximity and scoring using native interfaces or RESTful APIs facilitate near real-time in-transaction inferencing and yields substantial improvements in service level agreements (SLAs)
IBM Watson Machine Learning for z/OS v3.1 - Core Edition offers a lightweight yet enterprise grade set of REST-API based core AI services that includes online scoring, making it easy for applications running on z/OS to leverage this offering as their AI engine as part of their solution. WMLz Core Edition will be the foundation for our strategy of AI powered solutions on Z, which is to infuse AI into Z solutions wherever possible, and thus our customers can get out of box values without requiring AI skills and talents.

See IBM Machine Learning for z/OS.

Cloud Pak for Data on IBM Z

This is an enhanced, powerful Auto AI tool within Cloud Pak for Data 4.7 for automating the process of building machine learning models.

It allows users to upload their data, choose the problem type, specify constraints and run a series of automated experiments that generate a range of high-performing pipelines quickly and easily.

See Cloud Pak for Data on IBM Z.

IBM z/OS 3.1, an AI-infused operating system

Using the new AI System Services for IBM z/OS, the system is designed to learn and predict how to optimize IT processes, simplify management, improve performance and reduce special skills requirements.

The system provides intelligent automation and accelerated inferencing at scale to extract and leverage valuable data insights:

AI Framework for IBM z/OS provides foundational AI capabilities that are designed to support the incorporation and operationalization of prebuilt AI models, intended to augment z/OS and its components with intelligence that optimizes IT processes, designed to help simplify management, improves performance, and reduces skills requirements.
AI-powered Workload Manager (WLM), designed to intelligently predict upcoming batch workload and react accordingly to optimize system resources in a proactive way. This AI capability represents the first use case that leverages the AI Framework for IBM z/OS.
The Workload Manager is enhanced with performance measurement data analysis that is provided by the z/OSMF WLM Policy Advisor, designed to extract insights and identify suboptimal settings. Based on the analysis results, the user might need to adjust settings and policy definitions for optimized performance. IBM SMF Explorer provides a data access and analysis toolkit that is designed to help even novice users access SMF data and extract insights in an easy and modern way, leveraging Python and Jupyter Notebooks.

For a deep dive into the features, see IBM z/OS 3.1, an AI-infused operating system for the next generation of computing.

Next steps

Learn how to Getting started with AI on IBM Z and LinuxONE systems. You will find articles on: