LinuxCon Preview: Details on the Watson Exhibit

After strutting its stuff on Jeopardy! earlier this year, IBM's Watson will be included at LinuxCon in a special exhibit August 17-19, 2011. We got some time with the IBM Power Systems Product Marketing Manager Ian Jarman to better understand what we can expect and what Watson and its IBM team have been working on since their very public victory earlier this year.

Please tell us about the Watson exhibit planned for LinuxCon. What should attendees expect?

Jarman: You can try your luck against Watson in a simulated demonstration of the system used on the Jeopardy! show. You'll also be able to learn more about the technology behind Watson, including its impressive 90 IBM Power 750 servers, with 2880 POWER7 processor cores and 15 TB of memory. Most of all, I hope you share some of the passion and excitement that I and so many others feel for Watson. The most moving moments I experienced on the project were actually during some of Watson's pre-show sparring matches. These were held in the IBM Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights in the small, practice Jeopardy! set right by the Watson machine room.

Playing against two previous Jeopardy! Tournament of Champions contestants, Watson cruised to victory in the first game. Seeing Watson in action close up, you couldn't help but have a very deep and special feeling of pride for all the people on the IBM Research team. In the second game, however, a young defense analyst from Washington D.C. hit the two daily doubles and won a close game. I happened to be sitting next to her mother in the audience just a few feet away, and I could literally feel her love and pride at having such a talented daughter. So, I left IBM that day knowing just how difficult it was going to be to compete against Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in the exhibition match. The stakes and the risks were going to be very high indeed. And this grand challenge was not going to be about man v. machine; it was going to be about people at their very best.

Photo Credit: John Tolva

Since its impressive appearance on Jeopardy!, what has Watson and the Watson team been working on?

Jarman: The IBM Research team has switched its attention to commercializing Watson technology, with health care as their first target. We don't expect Watson to replace doctors, of course, but we believe that Watson's DeepQA technology will be very valuable as an advisor in medical diagnostics. And the fact that Watson was based on commercially available Power 750 servers, makes it easy for us to scale Watson down to a system designed for a group medical practice.

Why is Watson based on Linux? What advantages does Linux give the supercomputer?

Jarman: Actually, we don't view Watson as a supercomputer. Compared to the Power 775 Supercomputer that has up to 500,000 POWER7 cores, Watson looks like a fairly small cluster. Instead, we prefer to talk of Watson as a workload optimized system, using a cluster of commercially available servers. In any case, using Linux was vital to the IBM Research team as they based their Watson development on a number of open source technologies, including Java, Apache, Hadoop and Apache Unstructured Information Management Architecture or UIMA. Watson also was a great showcase for Linux on Power Linux, demonstrating POWER7 scalability and performance in a unique Linux benchmark.

This is such an important year for both Linux and IBM. Linux turns 20 and IBM is celebrating 100 years. How has Linux shaped the kind of company IBM is today? How has it contributed to your company overall?

Jarman: In 2000, Linux received an important boost when IBM announced it would embrace Linux as strategic to its systems strategy. A year later, IBM invested US$1 billion to back the Linux movement, embracing it as an operating system for IBM servers and software. IBM’s actions grabbed the attention of CEOs and CIOs around the globe and helped Linux become accepted by the business world.  By inserting IBM developers directly into Linux communities, IBM engaged Linux development in natural ways, as a team of individuals, rather as than a lumbering and monolithic corporate contributor. IBM learned that involvement required influence in place of control and embraced the broad Linux community—benefitting greatly from the wisdom of the crowds. In 2011, Linux is a fundamental component of IBM business—embedded deeply in hardware, software, services and internal development. It is present in every IBM business, geography and workload, and its use only continues to increase.

IBM’s success today, and in the future, is inextricably linked to the healthy growth and expansion of Linux development.

For more information about Watson's appearance at LinuxCon and how you can test your own knowledge against the machine, visit our LinuxCon website.

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LinuxCon Preview: Marten Mickos on Why Linux Dominates in Cloud

As we prepared to announce our LinuxCon schedule this week, I talked to one of our keynote speakers, Eucalyptus Systems CEO Marten Mickos. Eucalyptus was one of the first companies on the cloud computing scene and Mickos is among the most respected open source entrepreneurs in the industry (having been CEO of MySQL AB before its acquisition by Sun Microsystems).

Mickos took a few minutes to share his thoughts on cloud computing and Linux, the new Open Virtualization Alliance, and how Linux has shaped our lives over the last 20 years.

I've heard people make the case recently that without Linux, cloud computing would not exist or would still be in the distant future. How has Linux enabled cloud computing, and why is it (Linux) so important for the future of the new enterprise environment?

Mickos: There are many reasons for this. Importantly, Linux became the dominant platform for all things web, so it's natural that Linux continues to be the foundation for the next paradigm: the cloud.

On a more technical note, Linux is an operating system built for scale-out (rather than scale-up). In previous software architectures, scale-up was the dominant design. But in a cloud world, everything has to scale out. That's why Linux is a perfect fit for cloud.

There are other reasons too: the world of software is increasingly flat. Anyone and everyone can participate and contribute. As the leading open source operating system, Linux is the natural magnet for such crowd creativity. That's why Linux evolves faster than other operating system.

Finally, it certainly helps that many of the key technologies needed in a cloud environment are open source products that run well with Linux. To name just a few: KVM, Puppet, Mule, Spring, Hadoop, MySQL and Eucalyptus.

As an early company to the now crowded cloud computing space, what is Eucalyptus doing today to help Linux enterprise and mobile users?

Mickos: You are right that Eucalyptus was among the early pioneers when the project started as an NSF-funded research project in 2007 at UC Santa Barbara. We early on decided to focus on enterprise and mobile users. From a technical standpoint, we chose the GPL license and we wrote the product in Java for highly-scalable, mission-critical use.

The product goes through extensive QA in our own internal cloud, and it's packaged and ready for people to download and put in production. In the past year, we have seen more than 25,000 new Eucalyptus clouds start up all over the world. It's great to know that we are being useful to students, researchers, developers and businesses!

We innovate fast and add new features to the product that our users are requesting. You can see the features of our upcoming release 3.

Because we are fully compatible with the cloud API of Amazon Web Services, you can move any AWS application onto Eucalyptus. Additionally, we make sure we have a strong ecosystem of partners with products that work well with Eucalyptus. This is what enables users of all types to quickly get going with their various cloud projects.

Can you tell us more about the new Open Virtualization Alliance? Why is Eucalyptus investing here, and what do you hope comes from the efforts?

Mickos: KVM is a powerful hypervisor with a great future. The fact that it is embedded in the Linux kernel makes it the obvious choice for Linux-based cloud deployments. Eucalyptus supports all major hypervisors, but we have a natural affinity to the ones under an open source license. In the Open Virtualization Alliance we get to participate in important work on performance enhancements on KVM in general and the KVM-Eucalyptus combination in particular. We share with our users a passion for software that runs fast and scales well.

So, can you give us a sneak peek into what we should expect from your LinuxCon keynote in August?

Mickos: I will talk about the shift of software infrastructure to the cloud paradigm, and about the implications this will have on free and open source software. I happen to believe that the shift to cloud is bigger than the shift to the Internet was fifteen years ago. Nearly all aspects of the software stack are in for a big disruption.

This August also marks the 20th anniversary of Linux. What do you think is the most interesting or important impact Linux has had on the world of technology?

Mickos: You know, I think Linux's most important impact is societal. Linus (Linus Torvalds in Pictures) showed all people on this planet that open collaboration leads to superior results. We need more openness, more transparency and more collaboration in this world. Thanks to Linux, it is happening. We see other areas of society learn from the world of free and open source software. The current big social trend on the mobile web has (perhaps unknowingly) borrowed many characteristic from the Linux project.

That said, Linux has had and continues to have a profound impact on the specific world of technology. There isn't a car or a medical device or a computer that doesn't run some sort of open source software today. Every leading web or mobile service uses open source software. Linux wasn't the first and isn't the only one, but it is the standard bearer of this amazing movement.

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Technical Preview of Mageia ARM Port

The Mageia project has published a first preview of a Mageia port for ARM processors. The port, code-named "arm eabi", includes several development tools, basic network services and a full GNOME desktop environment - a minimal version of KDE is also included

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