At the annual Technology Conference & Expo dubbed “Smarter Computing” held at Shangri-La Makati Hotel, IBM showcased a small-scale version of their supercomputer named Watson. This computer successfully competed and won against two Jeopardy! Hall of Famers a couple of months back in an actual Jeopardy game.
We already talked about Watson before here and IBM did not create it to beat people at Jeopardy! With its natural language processing skill and the ability to quickly and correctly interpret queries against a huge set of data makes it a valuable asset to a lot of industry. Of course, it doesn’t mean that we will be seeing Watson-like computers manning banks or healthcare offices or call centers in the near future but the technology is there for governments and businesses to look into. I don’t see it replacing real people though as most are still uncomfortable talking to computers over the phone or even face to face to solve problems.
Watson is powered by IBM’s new and commercially available POWER7 system that can be modeled to handle any specific workload. The POWER7 system demonstrates how IBM workload-optimized systems provide unmatched capabilities for analyzing millions of stored data and processing thousands of simultaneous tasks at rapid speeds. In addition, these systems can provide clients with very high levels of server virtualization and consolidation, which can lead to improved price performance, improved energy efficiency and reduced footprint size in the data center.
Market research studies show that more and more clients are choosing to run their businesses on IBM Power Systemsm. In the Philippines, IBM was also number one in UNIX, growing revenue by 12 percent resulting in IBM holding 53.9 percent market share according to IDC.
Feel free to visit the “Watson Kiosk” at the event where you can personally experience a simulated Jeopardy game show against Watson.