[ Thanks to Steven J.
Vaughan-Nichols for this link. ]
“”I’ll take evil, science-fiction computers for
$2,000,” Alex. OK, we’re not quite there yet, but in the early
going, IBM’s Watson supercomputer beat Jeopardy super-champions Ken
Jennings and Brad Rutter in a practice round. And, what is Watson
running? Linux, of course.“There’s nothing surprising about that. The fastest of fast
computers have long used Linux In the latest TOP 500 list of the
world’s most powerful supercomputers, 459 of the Top 500
supercomputers were running Linux.“Watson is made up of ten racks of IBM POWER 750 servers running
Linux, and has 15Terabytes of RAM; 2,880 3.55GHz POWER7 processor
cores and operates at 80 Teraflops. You’re not going to find one of
these at your local Best Buy.”