IBM SUPERCOMPUTER, WATSON
TERM PAPER: IBM SUPERCOMPUTER, WATSON
IBM Supercomputer, Watson Watson uses two thousand eight hundred and eighty processor cores to perform its calculations. This is made possible by the use of ninety IBM Power 750 Express servers which contain eight quad core processors. So each server contains thirty two processor cores and there are ninety servers to combine to make the two thousand eight hundred and eighty processor cores that make up Watson’s brain . So what would you define Watson to be? A midrange computer? A mainframe computer? Or a Supercomputer? I would define Watson to be a Supercomputer since it was designed for one purpose, can do more than just rapid mathematical computations. Watson has thousands of central processing units. It can perform computation-intensive applications and has a massive amount of online and offline storage .
The ability to coordinate all of these processors into one functioning logarithmic unit required a group of engineers from IBM to develop a specialized kernel-based virtual machine implementation with the ability to process eighty Tera-flops per seconds . The software that allowed all of this to occur is called Apache Hadoop. Hadoop is an open source framework software that is used to organize and manage grid computing environments. Since the theoretical limit of processors with current technology is set at a central processing unit (CPU) clock speed of three giga-hertz, a software model to enhance parallel processing for supercomputers had to be developed. With the use of Hadoop the programmers at IBM were able to more easily write applications for Watson that benefitted and took advantage of parallel processing to increase the speed at which problems could be solved and questions could be answered. The main reason why this makes things faster is the fact that one question can be researched in multiple paths at one time using parallel processing paths
IBM Supercomputer, Watson Watson uses two thousand eight hundred and eighty processor cores to perform its calculations. This is made possible by the use of ninety IBM Power 750 Express servers which contain eight quad core processors. So each server contains thirty two processor cores and there are ninety servers to combine to make the two thousand eight hundred and eighty processor cores that make up Watson’s brain . So what would you define Watson to be? A midrange computer? A mainframe computer? Or a Supercomputer? I would define Watson to be a Supercomputer since it was designed for one purpose, can do more than just rapid mathematical computations. Watson has thousands of central processing units. It can perform computation-intensive applications and has a massive amount of online and offline storage .
The ability to coordinate all of these processors into one functioning logarithmic unit required a group of engineers from IBM to develop a specialized kernel-based virtual machine implementation with the ability to process eighty Tera-flops per seconds . The software that allowed all of this to occur is called Apache Hadoop. Hadoop is an open source framework software that is used to organize and manage grid computing environments. Since the theoretical limit of processors with current technology is set at a central processing unit (CPU) clock speed of three giga-hertz, a software model to enhance parallel processing for supercomputers had to be developed. With the use of Hadoop the programmers at IBM were able to more easily write applications for Watson that benefitted and took advantage of parallel processing to increase the speed at which problems could be solved and questions could be answered. The main reason why this makes things faster is the fact that one question can be researched in multiple paths at one time using parallel processing paths
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