In case you're wondering, 1TB of capacity is still quite significant; it can hold 220 million pages of text or 111 DVDs.

"The amazing thing is that you can get all those answers with such a small data set," said John Webster, an analyst with the research firm Evaluator Group. "After multiple iterations of loading and testing and loading and testing and updating the database on SONAS, IBM came up with a version of the database of that would generate the data set that got loaded into memory."

Enter Australian computer programmer and SAMBA developer Andrew Tridgell.

Tridgell created the computer algorithm running on top of Watson's hardware that culls out the data set. Tridgell developed the open-source Clustered Trivial Database (CTDB), which the SAMBA file protocol uses to simultaneously access the memory across Watson's 90 servers.

More importantly, the CTDB makes sure none of the servers are stepping on each other as they also update information after a Jeopardy show.