Posts by Dr.Forbin 3 publicly visible posts • joined 1 May 2010
Raw processing power
Machine: Watson is a Linux system powered by 10 racks of IBM Power 750 servers with 2,880 processor cores.
It is capable of operating at 80 teraflops, or 80 trillion floating point operations per second.
Reference site: http://gcn.com/articles/2011/02/10/watson-vs-human-brain-tale-of-the-tape.aspx
Most important, Watson's natural language processing-NLP programming/"abilities?" is one of many break thru AI researchers are striving for. NLP is the holy grail of these endeavors. Quite simple, as massive amounts of computer data is accumulated there is no way a human can make any sense, or perhaps a better description might be how the data items are related to each other, thus the need for supercomputer(As a complete system, Watson is a super computer cluster.)
While the average IT department might purchase one IBM Power 750 server, my belief is that most IT departments would be hard press to justify the purchase proposal of ninety servers each with 250 gigabyte ram memory. Watson NLP abilities are now just being explored, image Watson as a front end interface for data mining to any, all? databases that have terabytes of information. Watson latest endeavor, are medical records examinations, in order to assist in clinical medical diagnosis. Imagine the possibilities, maybe one day Watson might be appointed to a Presidential cabinet position, this way all of the Intelligence Agencies could submit their reports to Watson, or better yet, submit the full stream of intelligence data, Watson would then analyze the data and make the appropriate recommendations to the President, no more ambiguous, bias (PDB) reports; Yes, I'm a big fan of the movie "Colossus"- The Forbin Project. ;-)
http://www.davidevans.googlepages.com
Just one more thing that Google is trying to do to gain some market share from Apple iphone, trying to demonstrate another thing that the Android Operating systems does, that the Iphone OS system does not do. It's true that Google has some vested interest in flash, for media presentation for their You-Tube site; But you know that there are a bunch of Google Computer Engineers, using their 10 percent time
devising a demonstration of running videos on You-Tube using HTML5, CSS, and javascript, all running in a "GoogleWizy" -TM, a flash to (HTML5, CSS, javascript) native computer binary compiler.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
