Wolfram Alpha maandag a.s. klaar voor 175M vragen/24uur

[Cees Binkhorst]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

Vraag me af of het internet merkbaar langzamer gaat worden m.i.v. maandag
18 mei2009?

En ben héél benieuwd of Wolfram Alpha het gaat maken.
Afgaand op de eerdere Wolfram producten op http://www.wolfram.com/ en de
brainpower binnen het bedrijf verwacht ik er wel veel van.

Het zou me eerlijk gezegd niet verbazen als Wolfram Alpha tot stand is
gekomen met behulp, of als afgeleide, van Objectica (Objectica is a
package for Mathematica that allows to write object oriented programs
easily in Mathematica).
In de documentatie over Objectica wordt immers gezegd: Simulation of the
real world that is composed of objects ;)

Het zou een ongelooflijk mooi voorbeeld zijn van de kracht van
objectoriëntatie.

Groet / Cees

Eerste reaktie van Google op Wolfram Alpha?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/technology/8047076.stm
Google said in its quest to create the perfect search engine, it cannot
afford to rest on its laurels.
The company's comments came at an event billed as a "state of the union"
on search as it unveiled new products that aim to push search in a new
direction.
Google has over 63% of the US market compared to rival Yahoo with 20%.
"The race in search is far from over and innovation and continued
improvement is absolutely pivotal," said Google's Marissa Mayer.
"I've said this many times but search is still in its infancy. Our
engineers are worried about what is the next big thing in search and how
are they going to find it," said Ms Mayer who is the vice president of
search products and user experience.
She said last year Google released over 365 products and in the first
quarter of this year it was 120. Ms Mayer added that this was proof that
"Google gets better all the time."
[deel weggelaten]

http://www.twine.com/item/122mz8lz9-4c/wolfram-alpha-is-coming-and-it-could-be-as-important-as-google
[deel weggelaten]
Wolfram Alpha doesn't merely answer questions, it also helps users to
explore knowledge, data and relationships between things. It can even open
up new questions -- the "answers" it provides include computed data or
facts, plus relevant diagrams, graphs, and links to other related
questions and sources. It also can be used to ask questions that are new
explorations between relationships, data sets or systems of knowledge. It
does not just provides textual answers to questions -- it helps you
explore ideas and create new knowledge as well
[deel weggelaten]

http://www.pcmag.com/
Wolfram Alpha to Run On Supercomputers
ARTICLE DATE:  05.12.09
By  Mark Hachman, ExtremeTech

Wolfram Research said Tuesday that it plans to launch its Wolfram Alpha
technology on five different locations, including the world's 44th largest
supercomputer.

The reason? The company can't anticipate how much traffic the site will
receive, and Wolfram said it wants to be prepared.

Wolfram Alpha is a hybrid of a search engine and an encyclopedia, designed
to generate the answer to a search query, rather than the most relevant
information. The Wolfram Alpha site goes live on May 18.

What does it all add up to? The ability to handle 175 million queries
(yielding maybe a billion results per day)—over 5 billion queries
(encompassing around 30 billion calculations) per month," the company
wrote in a blog post. "Big ambitions? We hope it's more than enough
capacity even at the busiest peak times of the day, and more importantly,
that it will give you a great computable knowledge experience."

Wolfram Alpha servers will be located in five sites, labeled as 0, 2, 3,
4, and 5, with the "1" location designated as a backup.

"What computing power have we gathered in these facilities for launch day?
Two supercomputers, just about 10,000 processor cores, hundreds of
terabytes of disks, a heck of a lot of bandwidth, and what seems like
enough air conditioning for the Sahara to host a ski resort," Wolfram
added.

One of those sites will be a supercomputer designed by R Systems, dubbed
the "R Smarr," ranked the 44th most powerful in the world as measured by
the TOP500 list. The system uses a Dell Cloud Computing DCS CS23-SH
system, powered by an unknown number of Intel E54xx "Harpertown"
processors.

The other sites will also be powered by Dell.

Wolfram co-founder Theodore Gray said in an interview that the company
frankly had no idea how much traffic to expect. "Our plans are
simultaneously open the site to everyone; that plan is kind of evolving,"
he said. "We don't have any idea how much traffic to expect, whether we're
going to be off by a factor of 10 or a factor of 100."

"We're gonna go live and we're gonna see what happens," Gray said.

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