September 22, 2011
SEATTLE, September 22, 2011---Attendees at SC11 will have the opportunity to match wits in a game of Jeopardy! with IBM's Watson computing system. SC11 will take place in the Washington State Convention and Trade Center in Seattle from Nov. 12-18.
Watson will be featured in a kiosk located on the 6th floor of the convention and trade center, separate from the main IBM booth. The kiosk is a version of the full IBM Power Systems-based Watson system that competed on the game show. Watson represents a significant advance in a computer's ability to understand context in human language -- a technology with potential applications in such domains as medicine. As has been demonstrated in some well-publicized contests, man versus computer in a game of Jeopardy is not the mismatch one might imagine. Understanding the complexities of natural language, which comes naturally to humans, is an extraordinary challenge for computers.
Nonetheless, Watson's ability to employ hundreds of algorithms simultaneously to process human language and rapidly retrieve answers from its massive database makes it a formidable competitor as Jeopardy champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter found out earlier this year when they took on the machine at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Laboratory in Yorktown, New York. Watson won, earning a grand total of $77,147 in a three-day contest, but not without struggling with some questions. Highlights are available on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFR3lOm_xhE
The Watson kiosk will offer four topic areas to explore, allowing attendees to learn more about the technology, the Watson machine itself and next steps for the Watson system. The fourth of these areas is the Jeopardy game. Those who choose to compete against the machine will be able to see the probabilities Watson calculated in formulating answers. Just as in the television version, contestants will be able to choose a question category and dollar amount, though there will be no host, and contestants will be on their honor for scoring.
"In addition to injecting an element of fun into SC11, Watson will show a dimension of computing that offers some intriguing future possibilities," said Scott Lathrop, SC11 General Chair. "In keeping with the theme for SC11, Watson offers one more way of 'connecting communities through HPC.'"
Eddie Epstein of IBM will present "The IBM Jeopardy! Challenge" as part of the SC11 technical program. This talk will give an overview of the IBM Jeopardy! Challenge, including problem challenges, the algorithm approach, the scale out implementation and the highly iterative development process used to develop the Watson system. Future uses of the technology will also be touched on. The Masterworks presentation will be held at 4:15 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 16 in The Conference Center rooms 301/302 (directly across the street from the Washington State Convention and Trade Center). http://sc11.supercomputing.org/schedule/event_detail.php?evid=mswk106
Watson is bound to find some worthy challengers at SC11.
About SC11
SC11, sponsored by the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) and the IEEE Computer Society, offers a world-class technical program, a comprehensive Communities Program, and an Exhibit Hall that together showcase the latest advances in high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis that are advancing scientific discovery, research, education and commerce. This premier international conference brings together experts from around the world along with people new to the community to share knowledge and information, to form new partnerships and collaborations, and to empower the attendees to enhance their productivity. For more information on SC11, please visit: http://sc11.supercomputing.org/.
-----
Source: SC11
In quieter times, sounding the bell of funding big science with big systems tends to resonate further than when ears are already burning with sour economic and national security news. For exascale's future, however, the time could be ripe to instill some sense of urgency....
Read more...
In a recent solicitation, the NSF laid out needs for furthering its scientific and engineering infrastructure with new tools to go beyond top performance, Having already delivered systems like Stampede and Blue Waters, they're turning an eye to solving data-intensive challenges. We spoke with the agency's Irene Qualters and Barry Schneider about..
Read more...
Large-scale, worldwide scientific initiatives rely on some cloud-based system to both coordinate efforts and manage computational efforts at peak times that cannot be contained within the combined in-house HPC resources. Last week at Google I/O, Brookhaven National Lab’s Sergey Panitkin discussed the role of the Google Compute Engine in providing computational support to ATLAS, a detector of high-energy particles at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
Read more...
May 23, 2013 |
The study of climate change is one of those scientific problems where it is almost essential to model the entire Earth to attain accurate results and make worthwhile predictions. In an attempt to make climate science more accessible to smaller research facilities, NASA introduced what they call ‘Climate in a Box,’ a system they note acts as a desktop supercomputer.
Read more...
May 22, 2013 |
At some point in the not-too-distant future, building powerful, miniature computing systems will be considered a hobby for high schoolers, just as robotics or even Lego-building are today. That could be made possible through recent advancements made with the Raspberry Pi computers.
Read more...
May 16, 2013 |
When it comes to cloud, long distances mean unacceptably high latencies. Researchers from the University of Bonn in Germany examined those latency issues of doing CFD modeling in the cloud by utilizing a common CFD and its utilization in HPC instance types including both CPU and GPU cores of Amazon EC2.
Read more...
May 15, 2013 |
Supercomputers at the Department of Energy’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) have worked on important computational problems such as collapse of the atomic state, the optimization of chemical catalysts, and now modeling popping bubbles.
Read more...
05/10/2013 | Cleversafe, Cray, DDN, NetApp, & Panasas | From Wall Street to Hollywood, drug discovery to homeland security, companies and organizations of all sizes and stripes are coming face to face with the challenges – and opportunities – afforded by Big Data. Before anyone can utilize these extraordinary data repositories, however, they must first harness and manage their data stores, and do so utilizing technologies that underscore affordability, security, and scalability.
04/15/2013 | Bull | “50% of HPC users say their largest jobs scale to 120 cores or less.” How about yours? Are your codes ready to take advantage of today’s and tomorrow’s ultra-parallel HPC systems? Download this White Paper by Analysts Intersect360 Research to see what Bull and Intel’s Center for Excellence in Parallel Programming can do for your codes.
In this demonstration of SGI DMF ZeroWatt disk solution, Dr. Eng Lim Goh, SGI CTO, discusses a function of SGI DMF software to reduce costs and power consumption in an exascale (Big Data) storage datacenter.
The Cray CS300-AC cluster supercomputer offers energy efficient, air-cooled design based on modular, industry-standard platforms featuring the latest processor and network technologies and a wide range of datacenter cooling requirements.