IBM Watson Plumbing and Jeopardy Ratings

February 20, 2011

For you IBM fans, Computerworld reveals the plumbing for the IBM PR coup. Navigate to “Brain behind IBM’s Watson not Unlike a Human’s.” To get a sense of  the human squasher, you will get factoids like these:

Watson’s SONAS is populated with 48 450GB serial ATA (SATA) hard drives for a total of 21.61TB of capacity in a RAID 1 (mirrored) configuration; that leaves 10.8TB of raw data that is used by Watson every time it’s booted up. Three terabytes of that, however, is used for the operating system and applications. But it’s not SONAS’s disk-based storage that makes Watson so darned fast; it’s the CPUs and memory. Every time Watson boots, the 10.8TB of data is automatically loaded into Watson’s 15TB of RAM…

You definitely need one for your home and one for your office.

But the point that jumped out at me was this one:

If IBM’s Watson were just some other human Jeopardy contestant, viewers probably would have tuned out in the midst of such a landslide victory. Instead, interest in the man vs. machine battle gave the show its highest ratings in nearly six years.

That is the real point: ratings.

Stephen E Arnold, February 20, 2011

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Comments

2 Responses to “IBM Watson Plumbing and Jeopardy Ratings”

  1. windows8forum on February 21st, 2011 3:17 am

    IBM’s Watson, a great job and three terabytes is used for the operating system and applications.

  2. Vizicore on March 21st, 2011 8:08 pm

    I’m really shocked that Watson was able to complete such a task. I really applaud IBM for developing such a super computer!

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