The original algorithm singled threaded on a single core processor took two hours to scan memory and produce an answer. So the IBM technologists just divided two hours by 2,880 CPUs, which produced the ability to answer questions in three-seconds.

If IBM's Watson were just some other human Jeopardy contestant, viewers probably would have tuned out in the midst of such a landslide victory. Instead, interest in the man vs. machine battle gave the show its highest ratings in nearly six years.

Competition between humans and computers have long captured the public's imagination. Remember the 1996 chess match between IBM's Deep Blue computer and the reigning world champion Garry Kasparov?

In this case, though, Watson has more in common with humans than Deep Blue. Like us, he only uses a small percentage of his massive memory capacity to answer questions.

simple scribble-faced monitor that he used as a Jeopardy contestant are 90 IBM Power 750 Express servers powered by 8-core processors -- four in each machine for a total of 32 processors per machine. The servers are virtualized using a Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) implementation, creating a server cluster with a total processing capacity of 80 teraflops. A teraflop is one trillion operations per second.