Watson

In the past computer were thought to be large, slow and of not much use, being made originally to do large tests such as sending a man to the moon, computers were thought to be something for the government, but now that has changed. With the unveiling of Watson an artificial computer system that can answer questions in the natural language it was shown that computers still have a large future in technology. Watson was a IBM DeepQA project for a research team led by principal investigator David Ferrucci.

Watson is composed of some very expensive and high tech hardware. Having POWER7 processors and the DeepQA IBM hardware. Watson is made up of a cluster of ninety IBM Power 750 servers plus additional I/O, network and cluster controller nodes in 10 racks with a total of 2880 POWER7 processor cores and 16 Terabytes of RAM. Each Power 750 server uses a 3.5 GHz POWER7 eight core processor, with four threads per core. The POWER7 processor's massively parallel processing capability is an ideal match for Watson's IBM DeepQA software which is embarrassingly parallel (that is a workload that is easily split up into multiple parallel tasks).
To test Watson it was put into the game show Jeopardy. He participated in three games one of which was against the man with the longest win streak and the biggest all time money winner. This proves that the computer system that is Watson and is effective, they also named Watson after IBM’s first president, Thomas J. Watson.
Watson could definitely be the start to something big. He could be the beginning to self moving and robot figures like what  you see in Star Wars, since Watson talks that part is already taken care of. Though as soon as they have a working body for one we could be seeing robots in our houses making us coffee and toast in the morning and turning out the lights at night.