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IBM's Mira supercomputer does ten petaflops with ease, inches us closer to exascale-class computing
Say hello to the Blue Gene/Q, or if you're looking for something a bit less intimidating, "Mira." That's IBM's latest and greatest concoction, a ten-petaflop supercomputer capable of running programs at ten quadrillion calculations a second. Hard to say who'd win between Mira and Watson, of course, but there's absolutely no question who'd come out on top if Mira were pitted against her predecessor Intrepid (hint: Mira's 20x faster). To put this all in perspective, IBM's chiming in with this: "If every man, woman and child in the United States performed one calculation each second, it would take them almost a year to do as many calculations as Mira will do in one second." Mira's next stop is at the US Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory, where it'll be used to tackle 16 projects in particular that were drawn from a pool of proposals to gain access to her capabilities. We're told that these include a range of initiatives -- from reducing energy inefficiencies in transportation and developing advanced engine designs to spurring advances in energy technologies -- and in time, it could lead to exascale-class computers "that will be faster than petascale-class computers by a factor of a thousand." And here we are getting excited about a 5GHz Core i7.
IBM's Watson is really smart, will try to prove it on Jeopardy! this fall (video)
As much as we love our Google homepage, computer search remains a pretty rudimentary affair. You punch in keywords and you get only indirect answers in the form of relevant web results. IBM doesn't seem to be too happy with this situation and has been working for the past three years on perfecting its Watson supercomputer: an array of server racks that's been endowed with linguistic algorithms allowing it to not only recognize oddly phrased or implicative questions, but to answer them in kind, with direct and accurate responses. Stuffed with encyclopedic knowledge of the world around it, it answers on the basis of information stored within its data banks, though obviously you won't be able to tap into it any time soon for help with your homework. The latest word is that Watson's lab tests have impressed the producers of Jeopardy! enough to have the bot participate in a televised episode of the show. That could happen as early as this fall, which fits right in line with our scheduled doom at robots' hands by the end of 2012. Ah well, might as well get our popcorn and enjoy the show.
IBM's Watson to rival humans in round of Jeopardy!
IBM's already proven that a computer from its labs can take on the world's best at chess, but what'll happen when the boundaries of a square-filled board are removed? Researchers at the outfit are obviously excited to find out, today revealing that its Watson system will be pitted against brilliant Earthlings on Jeopardy! in an attempt to further artificial intelligence when it comes to semantics and searching for indexed information. Essentially, the machine will have to be remarkably labile in order to understand "analogies, puns, double entendres and relationships like size and location," something that robotic linguists have long struggled with. There's no mention of a solid date when it comes to the competition itself, but you can bet we'll be setting our DVRs whenever it's announced. Check out a video of the progress after the break.[Via The New York Times]
IBM unveils one-petaflop Blue Gene/P supercomputer
It was but two years ago that we all sat in awe of IBM's beautiful 280.6-teraflop masterpiece, and it's finally safe to call that workhorse a thing of the past. Today, Big Blue announced the second-generation of its famed supercomputer (dubbed Blue Gene/P), which reportedly comes close to "tripling the performance of its predecessor." In an attempt to showcase its might, IBM suggested that 27 million clinical trials could be computed "in just one afternoon using a sliver of its full power." Additionally, the engineers went the extra mile by crafting a highly scalable system that comes in "at least seven times more energy efficient than any other supercomputer," but we're sure those 294,912 processors (each touting four PowerPC 450 CPUs) can churn through some energy when utilizing the whole petaflop. And just think, Sun probably thought the 500 or so teraflop production from its forthcoming Ranger would be the (momentary) top dog.Read - IBM's Blue Gene/P, via CNETRead - Sun's Ranger, via Wired
