Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has announced they will be receiving a version of the Watson super computing system as a gift from big blue partner, IBM. The original Watson was made famous when it competed against and beat former champions on the national game show, Jeopardy! To achieve that accomplishment, the computer has to be able to sort through 200 million pages of data including the entire contents of Wikipedia in a matter of seconds.
The version RPI will receive will have similar specifications as the original $3 million Watson computer with 750 eight core processors and 16 Terabytes of RAM. Enough computing power to process one million books per second. Current cost for Watson system is roughly $1 million and expected to continue to decrease, making the super computer much more widely available for commercial and research use.
“Access to the Watson system will enable new research in cognitive computing as it relates to a diverse range of scientific and engineering fields,” said Shirley Ann Jackson, Rensselaer President. “The experience of working on Watson will give our students an advantage as they compete for the best jobs in Big Data, analytics, and cognitive computing.”
With access to the computing power that Watson brings, modern industry, science and medicine will be able access information faster and easier than ever before. That power enables queries that ordinary computers cannot handle, such as complex mathematical computations based on historical statistics or information that varies by demographics. Thanks to natural speech recognition, it allows anybody to converse with it and get the information desired.
Imagine a doctor having a casual conversation with their computer discussing the symptoms of their last patient. Seamlessly, their computer counterpart can be searching the latest medical journals, comparing data with other patients on record based on age, sex, physical location and symptoms, offering alternative diagnoses, and suggest either the most successful, affordable or available treatment plan. A simple operation for Watson, but a monstrously time consuming task for a human.