What makes Watson tic?
So some of you have asked the question about Watson (the IBM super computer that won Jeopardy and made humanity weep...) what is it running? Is it a Mac? Is it a PC? Well the answer is actually, it's neither.
So here's the scoop straight from IBM. I should warn you this is a geek-tastic list of improbable numbers and incredible specs:
What operating system does Watson use? What language is he written in?
Watson is powered by 10 racks of IBM Power 750 servers running Linux, and uses 15 terabytes of RAM, 2,880 processor cores and is capable of operating at 80 teraflops. Watson was written in mostly Java but also significant chunks of code are written C++ and Prolog, all components are deployed and integrated using UIMA.
Watson contains state-of-the-art parallel processing capabilities that allow it to run multiple hypotheses – around one million calculations – at the same time. Watson is running on 2,880 processor cores simultaneously, while your laptop likely contains four cores, of which perhaps two are used concurrently. Processing natural language is scientifically very difficult because there are many different ways the same information can be expressed. That means that Watson has to look at the data from scores of perspectives and combine and contrast the results. The parallel processing power provided by IBM Power 750 systems allows Watson to do thousands of analytical tasks simultaneously to come up with the best answer in under three seconds.
So there you have it, 15 TB of RAM running on 2880 core processors...
Cheers to technology taking leaps and bounds! -D-[REDDIT.Blog]
Watson is powered by 10 racks of IBM Power 750 servers running Linux, and uses 15 terabytes of RAM, 2,880 processor cores and is capable of operating at 80 teraflops. Watson was written in mostly Java but also significant chunks of code are written C++ and Prolog, all components are deployed and integrated using UIMA.
Watson contains state-of-the-art parallel processing capabilities that allow it to run multiple hypotheses – around one million calculations – at the same time. Watson is running on 2,880 processor cores simultaneously, while your laptop likely contains four cores, of which perhaps two are used concurrently. Processing natural language is scientifically very difficult because there are many different ways the same information can be expressed. That means that Watson has to look at the data from scores of perspectives and combine and contrast the results. The parallel processing power provided by IBM Power 750 systems allows Watson to do thousands of analytical tasks simultaneously to come up with the best answer in under three seconds.
So there you have it, 15 TB of RAM running on 2880 core processors...
Cheers to technology taking leaps and bounds! -D-[REDDIT.Blog]
RSS Feed