Which operating system powers the world’s most famous supercomputer and Jeopardy! contestant? The answer is SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11. Watson, developed by IBM, recently won a Jeopardy practice round against previous champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter and is scheduled to be on the game show on Feb 14 and 16.
Watson runs on IBM’s high-performance, high-capacity Power servers and SUSE Linux Enterprise is the fastest operating system on POWER7, making it an ideal choice for Watson.
Containing more than 200 million digital pages of information and operating at a speed of over 80 teraflops in its digital “brain,” Watson uses a combination of deep analytics and rapid processing speeds that can interpret the types of “natural language” questions used in the long-running game show.
IBM’s DeepQA software, which runs on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11, on 10 racks of IBM Power 750 servers, powers the technology for those contestants who appear on “Jeopardy!” The POWER7® platform is known for its ability to meet high-performance, high-capacity and near-linear scaling. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is the fastest operating system on IBM POWER7, based on recent SPEC benchmarks, and thus a natural choice for IBM’s DeepQA software powering Watson.
Since 1993, SUSE Linux Enterprise engineers have made significant contributions to the advancement and tuning of the Linux kernel and key kernel-related performance technologies. With advanced memory management, new processor support, unmatched performance on systems with multicore processors, Native POSIX Thread Library (NPTL) and advanced multipathing and I/O capabilities, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is the clear choice for high-performance computing systems. It outperforms competitive systems in performance and scalability for large-scale server deployments, on industry standard blades and servers, mid-range systems and on high-end mainframes.
This is another significant achievement for Linux which currently runs most of the top supercomputers. Only a Linux operating system has the flexibility and computing capacity to run one of the world’s most powerful computers.
Can You substantiate these claims?
The link You refer to only post Power7 hardware performance,
The relevant test would be using the same application on top of the same hardware on e.g.
- AIX
- SUSE liunx
- Red Hat Linux.
It is of course a credit for SUSE that IBM chose this OS for Watson, but there could be many reasons for that,…
if it can be substantitated that SUSE indeed has a performance advantage, that woudl be most interesting.