Details about IBM Watson Supercomputer - LinuxJournal.com

[office politics]

System Administration of the IBM Watson Supercomputer | Linux Journal

quoted

Interview with Eddie Epstein on System Administration of the Watson Supercomputer
Eddie Epstein is the IBM researcher responsible for scaling out Watson's computation over thousands of compute cores in order to achieve the speed needed to be competitive in a live Jeopardy game. For the past seven years, Eddie managed the IBM team doing ongoing development of Apache UIMA. Eddie was kind enough to answer my questions about system administration of the Watson cluster.

AT: Why did you decide to use Linux?

EE: The project started with x86-based blades, and the researchers responsible for admin were very familiar with Linux.

AT: What configuration management tools did you use? How did you handle updating the Watson software on thousands of Linux servers?

EE: We had only hundreds of servers. The servers ranged from 4- to 32-core machines. We started with CSM to manage OS installs, then switched to xCat.

 

[Binary Ranger]

Huh, this is actually quite interesting to me. I saw that match when it debuted and I was so fascinated by it! Hardly Turing Test material, but still quite a feat.

I had no idea it ran on Linux based software though. I'm still a little new on the whole subject of "What makes a computer tick" topic. Still, It's always nice to know what the best machines, be they cars or compies, are packing under the hood/cooling case.