Jan 09
IBM just put the pedal to the metal on Watson’s crawl towards relevance. The company just announced a $1 billion investment, giving the supercomputer its own business division as well as an office in New York City’s Astor Place.
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Nov 14
Watson was always going to be more than just a successful game show contestant
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Oct 15
While Obama might be having a hell of a time trying to reform healthcare, we perhaps shouldn’t worry too much—because IBM’s supercomputer Watson is now being used to fix America’s shortage of doctors.
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Aug 14
For the past five years, the mad scientists at CERN have been connecting their computers to colleagues’ around the world to pool their processing power. This so-called Worldwide Grid turns a regular old desktop into a supercomputer by just plugging in. Now it will do the same with smartphones and tablets.
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Aug 06
You’ve undoubtedly heard over and over again about what an absurdly complex entity the human brain is. But a new breakthrough by Japanese and German scientists might finally drive the point home. Taking advantage of the almost 83,000 processors of one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers
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Mar 31
Mar 15
Last November, Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Titan supercomputer was named the fastest in the world. But it turns out that a few tests were skipped along the way—and now too much gold on its motherboards means it can’t run at full tilt. More »
Mar 02
Super computer Watson can crush puny humans at Jeopardy. It can do a pretty bang-up job as a doctor. It can swear up a storm. Two of those aren’t easy for a normal person, but that’s not enough for IBM. IBM wants more. And part of it’s plan to push Watson to its limits should really get things cooking. Literally. More »
Dec 10
IBM manufactures light-based ‘nanophotonic’ chips to let the terabytes flow
Posted in: Today's Chili 
IBM’s taken a large step toward computer chips that use photons instead of electrons by manufacturing the first 90nm silicon-based optical processing modules. It did so using the CMOS nanophotonics technology we first saw back in 2010, creating tranceivers capable of 25Gbps transfer speeds. By multiplexing a large number of those streams to a single fibre, “terrabytes of data” per second could flow between distant computer systems,” according to IBM. The 90 nanometer light circuits should allow data-hungry servers or supercomputers to scale up rapidly in speed “for the next decade, and at the desired low cost,” according to the researchers. It’s now primed for commercial development, meaning we could see an end to bottlenecks in systems “a few centimeters or a few kilometers” apart from each other. Check the PR for the detailed technical skinny.
Continue reading IBM manufactures light-based ‘nanophotonic’ chips to let the terabytes flow
Nov 13
Cray‘s Titan supercomputer has snatched the title of world’s fastest from the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Sequoia—and it’s cray fast, as you might expect. More »
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