Thanks2 D. Boyes for the explanation!
Sharing: FYI: noted from article: PCMAG.COM by Lance Ulanoff:
>From end of article: Microsoft, Symantec, ASUS and everyone else making
>technology for consumers, I have a warning for you: IBM and Watson have just
>put you on notice. Your customers have seen the future on Jeopardy!, and
>they're gonna want it NOW.
-----Original Message-----
From: The IBM z/VM Operating System [mailto:IBMVM@LISTSERV.UARK.EDU] On Behalf
Of Dave Jones
Sent: Wednesday, February 16, 2011 3:03 PM
To: IBMVM@LISTSERV.UARK.EDU
Subject: Re: Watson
Thanks for the explanation of the problem domain, Dr DB.; I appreciate it.
On 02/16/2011 10:42 AM, David Boyes wrote:
>> I, too, wished IBM would do more to highlight the z series
>> capabilities in public forums, but Watson is a massively parallel
>> system (2K+ cores, I believe), and I have my doubts as to whether
>> or not a collection of z10s could be integrated together tightly
>> enough to meet the software's requirements. I could be wrong,
>> however. :-)
>
> It could be done, but this is a case where it would have been the
> wrong choice.
>
> This is a vector-oriented SIMD problem (enormous numbers of simple
> comparisons on bits of data to determine if it has a right answer or
> not), and it's embarrassingly parallel in nature (very little shared
> data between comparisons, few locks, few context switches required).
> This is POWER's sweet spot, and forcing a Z into this role is
> probably not a good idea. This is not the kind of problem the Z arch
> is designed to solve.
