Meet the Man Behind the Jeopardy Super Computer at End User Summit

Valentine’s Day: chocolate hearts, love and super computers! At least this year my Valentine’s Day  will take a decidedly nerdy turn as I celebrate by watching the IBM Super Computer Watson compete on Jeopardy against two past champions. Creating a computer that can compete in a game show like this takes incredible technical achievement from many areas (from processors to understanding natural language). As Wired Magazine said, “When it comes to American technology innovation over the last hundred years, IBM is unparalleled.”

Of course Watson runs Linux, and we’re thrilled to feature the Principal Investigator of the Watson team, David Ferrucci, as the keynoter at our upcoming Linux Foundation End User Summit. Our End User Summit is a small event designed to advance collaboration between architects and senior operations people pushing the limits of Linux and the core developers of the kernel. Last year Bob Evans of NASDAQ OMX brought the house down with his detailed account of how they use Linux and what they’d like to see. This year, we’re thrilled to feature details of Watson.

AS HPCwire says, “And impressive technology it is. On the hardware side, Watson is comprised of 90 Power 750 servers, 16 TB of memory and 4 TB of disk storage, all housed in a relatively compact ten racks.”

But this isn’t the only technical talk at the End User Summit. We have Brian Stevens the CTO of Red Hat and deeply technical presentations on SSD storage, file systems, kernel tracing and more. If you are an architect or senior IT operations professional please request an invite. While the event is small so members can collaborate, we want users to hear all about Watson under the hood and celebrate the achievements of companies building amazing technology on Linux.