I heard this morning that "Watson" was going to Columbia University
Medical Center.
From: "A. Harry Williams" <ha...@vm.marist.edu>
To: IBMVM@LISTSERV.UARK.EDU
Date: 02/18/2011 03:08 PM
Subject: Re: Watson
Sent by: The IBM z/VM Operating System <IBMVM@LISTSERV.UARK.EDU>
On Wed, 16 Feb 2011 10:42:06 -0600 David Boyes said:
>> 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.
And to bring it back so the moderator doesn't yell again, as the System P
is improved to handle this better, it will eventually be integrated into
the
z196's successor, which will allow using each technology in their sweet
spot.
There has been some talk about Watson working in medical diagnosis.
Forgetting HIPPA issues for a minute, imagine having a process of using
medical billing procedure codes to feed into Watson to look at trends, or
assist in recommended procedures.
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