Final Jeopardy (Alexandra Cooper Mysteries) - Linda Fairstein [51]
Even as the avatar took shape, no one knew what sort of display it would run on. Davis and the Ogilvy team considered many options to house the avatar, including one technology that projected holograms on a pillar of fog. But they eventually turned to more traditional displays. In that realm, few could compete with Sony, Jeopardy’s parent company. Friedman said that Sony engineers conceivably could create a display for Watson, but that such an effort would probably require a call from IBM’s Sam Palmisano to Sony’s top executive, Howard Stringer. “We said, ‘That’s not going to happen,’” said one IBM executive. “We’ll save that call for something more important.” Still Sony had a possibility. In December, a team of five Sony employees flew from Tokyo to the Yorktown labs with a prototype of a new display. It was a projection technology so secret, they said, that no one could even take pictures of it. IBM considered it a bit too small for the Watson avatar, the Japanese contingent flew home, and the search continued.
Vannevar Bush, the visionary who in the 1940s imagined a mechanical World Wide Web, once wrote that “electronic brains” would have to be as big as the Empire State Building and require Niagara Falls to cool them. Of course, the computers he knew filled entire rooms, were built of vacuum tubes, and lacked the processing power of a hand-me-down cell phone. While Davis continued to develop Watson’s face, Ferrucci’s team started to grapple with a new challenge. To date, their work had focused on building software to master Jeopardy. Watson was only a program, like Microsoft’s Windows operating system or the video game Grand Theft Auto. To compete against humans, the Watson program would have to run on a specially designed machine. This would be Watson’s body. It might not end up as big as a skyscraper, but it would be a monster all the same. That much was clear.
The issue was speed. The millions of calculations for each question exacted a price in time. Millisecond by millisecond, they added up. Each clue took a single server an average of 90 minutes to 2 hours, more than long enough for Jennifer Chu-Carroll’s lunch break. For Watson to compete in Jeopardy, Ferrucci’s team had to shave that down to a maximum of 5 seconds and an average of 3.
How could Watson speed up by a factor of 1,440? In late 2008, Ferrucci entrusted this job to a five-person team of hardware experts led by Eddie Epstein, a senior researcher. For them, the challenge was to divide the work Watson carried out in two hours into thousands of stand-alone jobs, many of them small sequences of their own. They then had to distribute each job to a different processor for a second or two before analyzing the results cascading in. This work, or scale-out, required precise choreography—thousands of jobs calculated to the millisecond—and it would function only on a big load of hardware.
Epstein and his team designed a chunky body for Watson. Packing the computers closely limited the distance the information would have to travel and enhanced the system’s speed. It would develop into a cube of nearly 280 computers, or nodes, each with eight processors—the equivalent of 2,240 computers. The eight towers, each the size of a restaurant refrigerator, carried scores of computers on horizontal shelves, each about as big as a pizza box. The towers were tilted, like the one in Pisa, giving them more surface area for cooling. In its resting state, this assembly of machines emitted a low, whirring hum. But about a half hour before answering a Jeopardy question,