Approaching a singularity on multiple technological fronts

[ImaNihilist]

From a software realm, I think there needs to be a radical shift in how people perceive the problems that they write software to solve. We have single systems with 40 cores and 80 threads, and yet, there isn't really a workload that could take advantage of all of that, especially when usually your access to the storage solution backing it will end up single threaded (for example, linux and irqd).

It's a bit of a mathematics issue as well. It's difficult to multithread a lot of applications, especially those you want to respond in real time. Cutting up video to be rendered or compressing is easy—it's a fixed length and you can divide it any number of ways.

That's what was so interesting to me about Watson. They throw 3,000 cores at a something you wouldn't think could be heavily multithreaded, and it responds in near real time. I'm not quite sure how they did it. What, exactly, was each core doing? Some processing audio, some looking for keywords, others doing probability…but how do you scale that over 3,000 threads?