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IBM Opens Up Its Watson Supercomputer To Researchers
An anonymous reader writes IBM has announced the "Watson Discovery Advisor" a cloud-based tool that will let researchers comb through massive troves of data, looking for insights and connections. The company says it's a major expansion in capabilities for the Watson Group, which IBM seeded with a $1 billion investment. "Scientific discovery takes us to a different level as a learning system," said Steve Gold, vice president of the Watson Group. "Watson can provide insights into the information independent of the question. The ability to connect the dots opens up a new world of possibilities."
To use it, contact IBM, they in turn will send 'engineers' (really business sales men) to discuss it with your boss (not with you, you are too technical and can see through their poorly written language parser).
Those 'engineers' will try to put in lots of 'consultants' from IBM to interface their revolutionary new parse onto your data at great expense. Those will demoralize and undermine your programmers to try to take over the role in the company.
When they deliver something... eventually..., they'll then market it as a huge success and your boss will pretend it was, because he doesn't want to look like an idiot. IBM will continue to milk maintenance money from the company bleeding it dry with comically incompetent support staff.
Boss will leave to join IBM's team of 'engineers' perhaps.
Excuse my negativity, but IBM does not permit public comparison of its crap technology, and anyone who has benchmarked an IBM mainframe knows how big the gap is between their claims and the reality. The product here isn't 'Watson', it's IBM consultancy, which in my book has a negative value associated with it (based on a previous experience of IBM infesting a corp). Watson is just a marketing exercise used for novelty value.
Why is the term "Supercomputer" being used to describe Watson? No demonstrated systems have shown anywhere near the processor or node count that actual supercomputers have (the Watson machine on Jeopardy for instance was only 90 nodes with around 2K cores). Also it uses an off the shelf interconnect (10gbit fiber) with a simple hierarchical network fabric which doesn't even approach even small supercomputers in terms of performance (which use something like Infinband or Seastar in a N-Dimensional torus interconnect topology).
While I have nothing against the technology being used for Watson. The fact is that it is not a supercomputer and the division of IBM that did make supercomputers (BlueGene) has been disbanded (with most of the key individuals leaving for other places).