Technical Blog Post
Abstract
IBM Watson, 60 Minutes and Cloud Object Storage System
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Five years ago, IBM's Watson computer played and beat two humans on the popular American TV show "Jeopardy!" I wrote a series of blog posts about this, the most popular was [IBM Watson -- How to replicate Watson hardware and systems design for your own use in your basement].
Last Sunday, Charlie Rose presented Watson, its progress over the past five years, and the concept of Artificial Intelligence in general, on the TV show "60 Minutes".
Two years ago, the folks at University of Toronto asked me to help their graduate students build a "Watson" running entirely on IBM SoftLayer to see if this would be a worthwhile class project. Needless to say, it was more difficult than they expected, but we managed to pull it off during that summer, able to answer a handful of simple questions from a single page corpus.
Last month, [Industry Leaders Establish Partnership on AI], combining the talents from Amazon, DeepMind/Google, Facebook, IBM and Microsoft, to form a non-profit to explore best practices and ethical questions related to Watson and other Artificial Intelligence applications.
Since data is at the core of any Artificial Intelligence, IBM is pleased to announce today that IBM Cloud Object Storage System is now available on IBM SoftLayer. This is based on the Cleversafe technology IBM acquired last year.
While other cloud service providers have offered data storage in the cloud, this new offering also allows hybrid configurations with geographically dispersed erasure coding. Unlike RAID which protects against the loss of one or two drives, erasure coding can protect against a larger number of concurrent failures. For example, using an Information Dispersal Algorithm of "7+5", where seven pieces of data are encoded on twelve independent disks, the system can lose up to five disk drives without losing any data.
Click graphic to view larger
Combining this with Geographically Dispersed Configuration across three or more sites means that you can lose an entire data center, four of the twelve disks, and still have instant full access to all of your data from eight drives at the other locations. In the graphic, you see two on-premise data centers combined with a third location in IBM SoftLayer.
A recent UBS study determined that [IBM is one of the top four Cloud Service Providers], joining the ranks of Amazon, Google and Microsoft.
This is just another example that IBM's transformation to a Cognitive Solutions and Cloud Platform company is paying off. To learn more, read the [Press Release: IBM Redefines Security, Availability and Economics of Storing Data in the Hybrid Cloud].
technorati tags: IBM, Watson, Jeopardy, 60 Minutes, Charlie Rose, University Toronto, SoftLayer, Google DeepMind, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Artificial Intelligence, IBM Cloud, IBM Cloud Object Storage, Cleversafe, erasure coding, geographically dispersed, UBS, Hybrid Cloud, Cognitive Solutions
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ibm16157173