Thank you for an excellent explanation, Dr. Boyes. -----Original Message----- From: The IBM z/VM Operating System [mailto:IBMVM@LISTSERV.UARK.EDU] On Behalf Of David Boyes Sent: Wednesday, February 16, 2011 10:42 AM To: IBMVM@LISTSERV.UARK.EDU Subject: Re: Watson
> I, too, wished IBM would do more to highlight the z series > capabilities in public forums, but Watson is a massively parallel > system (2K+ cores, I believe), and I have my doubts as to whether or > not a collection of z10s could be integrated together tightly enough > to meet the software's requirements. I could be wrong, however. :-) It could be done, but this is a case where it would have been the wrong choice. This is a vector-oriented SIMD problem (enormous numbers of simple comparisons on bits of data to determine if it has a right answer or not), and it's embarrassingly parallel in nature (very little shared data between comparisons, few locks, few context switches required). This is POWER's sweet spot, and forcing a Z into this role is probably not a good idea. This is not the kind of problem the Z arch is designed to solve.
