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You can almost hear the article author completely misunderstanding what he was told. I'm betting it was something like, "For Jeopardy, Watson was using 15 Tera

by drblast 13y ago

You can almost hear the article author completely misunderstanding what he was told. I'm betting it was something like, "For Jeopardy, Watson was using 15 Terabytes of data stored on 90 servers. And those servers were large back then, now they're your standard pizza box 1U's. And because of advances in storage technology we can store a lot more in the same space." Isn't there some sort of basic tech literacy class for people who write these articles? It's like reading the sports section and seeing "The Seattle Seahawks are a group of big men and they ran at another group of big men, and they've been doing that a lot, and faster lately. Some of the men in the Seahawks group are smaller and faster, so they are harder to catch by the other group of big men. The Seahawks grouping of men is like a successful business, because they've been winning competitions against other groups."

ghshephard 13y ago
16 Terabytes of RAM on P750s. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watson_(computer) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watson_(computer) "Watson is made up of a cluster of ninety IBM Power 750 servers (plus additional I/O, network and cluster controller nodes in 10 racks) with a total of 2880 POWER7 processor cores and 16 Terabytes of RAM. Each Power 750 server uses a 3.5 GHz POWER7 eight core processor, with four threads per core. "
cstross 13y ago
There is some more prize gibberish in that article: Saxena said IBM is ready to make a big a bet on Watson, as it did in the 1970s when it invested in the emergence of the mainframe. Leaving aside the grammatical error (it's probably just an editing artefact), what bed did IBM make in the 1970s on the emergence of the mainframe? Is that a typo for 1950s? Or just unvarnished ignorance of computing history? It's stuff like this that makes me mistrust a news source: if they get it blazingly wrong about something I know enough about to have a working bullshit detector for, what are the chances that they're not also getting it wrong about everything else?
- nl 13y ago
  To be fair, the System/360 (which was the first to run the classic OS/360 operating system) was released in '64[1], and was replaced in the '70s by the S/370. Certainly mainframes were in use prior to the '70s, but the S/360 was the first "classic" mainframe in that it was designed for both business & scientific use[2], and it wasn't until the 70's that they began to become more popular in areas outside their traditional use. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/360 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/360 [2]

by drblast 13y ago

ghshephard 13y ago

16 Terabytes of RAM on P750s. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watson_(computer) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watson_(computer) "Watson is made up of a cluster of ninety IBM Power 750 servers (plus additional I/O, network and cluster controller nodes in 10 racks) with a total of 2880 POWER7 processor cores and 16 Terabytes of RAM. Each Power 750 server uses a 3.5 GHz POWER7 eight core processor, with four threads per core. "

cstross 13y ago

There is some more prize gibberish in that article: Saxena said IBM is ready to make a big a bet on Watson, as it did in the 1970s when it invested in the emergence of the mainframe. Leaving aside the grammatical error (it's probably just an editing artefact), what bed did IBM make in the 1970s on the emergence of the mainframe? Is that a typo for 1950s? Or just unvarnished ignorance of computing history? It's stuff like this that makes me mistrust a news source: if they get it blazingly wrong about something I know enough about to have a working bullshit detector for, what are the chances that they're not also getting it wrong about everything else?

nl 13y ago
To be fair, the System/360 (which was the first to run the classic OS/360 operating system) was released in '64[1], and was replaced in the '70s by the S/370. Certainly mainframes were in use prior to the '70s, but the S/360 was the first "classic" mainframe in that it was designed for both business & scientific use[2], and it wasn't until the 70's that they began to become more popular in areas outside their traditional use. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/360 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/360 [2]