After the success with supercomputer Deep Blue in beating the world chess champion Garry Kasparov, IBM engineers are taking on Jeopardy champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. Their new creation "Watson" is a machine consisting of 10 racks of IBM POWER 750 servers with a total of 15 Terabytes of memory (RAM). With 2,880 processor cores this device can produce 80 Teraflops. It is powered by the operating system Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server to be precise, and uses IBM's DeepQA software.
The main challenge of this project is not so much the vast amount knowledge that is required to cover the wide range of topics that may come up, since even standard computers now can have several terabytes of memory space and even more hard disk space to store information. The hard part is processing and understanding natural language as it is used in the game, and retrieving the information requested within a few seconds.
Watson's game is scheduled for February 14th. For more information see the project page on the IBM web site.
The main challenge of this project is not so much the vast amount knowledge that is required to cover the wide range of topics that may come up, since even standard computers now can have several terabytes of memory space and even more hard disk space to store information. The hard part is processing and understanding natural language as it is used in the game, and retrieving the information requested within a few seconds.
Watson's game is scheduled for February 14th. For more information see the project page on the IBM web site.
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