Can IBM’s Watson supercomputer beat humans at their own game?
Big Blue will begin to learn the answer this week, when the system will square off against past Jeopardy champions. And to do it, Watson is looking to the Linux operating system.
Specifically, IBM’s Watson is powered by Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES), a perennial favorite among the world’s leading supercomputers.
“The POWER7 platform on which Watson runs is known for its ability to meet high-performance, high-capacity and near-linear scaling,” said Kerry Kim, Novell’s enterprise Linux solution manager. “SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is the fastest operating system on IBM POWER7, based on recent SPEC benchmarks, and thus a natural choice for IBM’s DeepQA software powering Watson.”
Linux Planet has the story on Linux’s role in IBM’s supercomputer Jeopardy challenge.