Wolfram Alpha to Run On Supercomputers

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 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."