14 DAY TRIAL // Supercomputers are commonly used by enterprises and government and/or scientific organizations in various research tasks, but some have far more, shall we say, mundane purposes, and HP wants Watson to be one of them.
Watson is one of the most powerful supercomputer that HP ever built, but its fame lies not in its 80 TeraFLOPs performance (which doesn't place it in the Top 500 list), but in its artificial intelligence.
That's right, Watson is an artificially intelligent computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language.
It proved this when it won a game of “Jeopardy” against world champions. Now, IBM wants to turn the New York City-based high-performance computer into a business all on its own.
Not to answer questions mind you, but to provide a new type of cloud service, one that can actually use that intelligence and the ability of the Watson to learn from past experiences.
A sum of $1 billion / €730 million will be invested towards this goal, and HP hopes to eventually have 2,000 people working with Watson and the new business headquarters in the heart of New York.
"Watson does more than find the needle in the haystack," said IBM CEO Ginni Rometty ahead of the company's presentation on January 9, 2014. "It understands the haystack. It understands context."
The new headquarters is being built near New York University and other tech companies. It will be an angular glass building, which will make it stand out among the older buildings there.
Also, $100 million / €73 million will go to startup companies willing to develop apps meant to run through Watson.
Right now, only 27 people are part of the business, led by long-time IBM executive Michael Rhodin. They will market and sell services and host engineering and development work and collaborations (with both companies and customers).