Counting Down
146 Comments 
We’re in the final stages of our “countdown” to be able to launch Wolfram|Alpha. It is an exciting time here in the control room. The team here is gearing up to finally go live, and the energy in the room is palpable.
As you’d fully expect, our teams are full-court-press resolving network, infrastructure, database, and all sorts of other challenges, made particularly interesting by the sheer scale and complexity of launching two supercomputer-class clusters along with three other locations.
One of the biggest challenges we’re navigating today is effectively linking our supercomputers together. We’ve been switching on more and more compute capacity, with the expectation of having full capacity available on Monday.
Tonight, we’re looking to begin to test the system on a larger scale, get a sense of how it will behave, and continue performance tuning.
We’re also looking forward to seeing you this evening live on justin.tv.
Oh… and we’re in Illinois, and we just heard that we’re under a tornado watch.
It will be an interesting evening!
Great job guys! This is really an amazing idea. Keep up the good work!
pair back on the philosophical expectations and launch/post the pragmatic search engine
Thanks tfitz. That link worked for me for about 5 minutes, but now it seems to not be working. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.
It is past 9pm CST, and still not working from here in CANADIA :P
Hmm, non event this is! Was advertised in our local paper as being bigger than Google!!
Guuuys…. HEY! You have to update the INDEX file for the search engine! People are STUCK waiting for the input to start working.
I just discovered i have to add /input/ at the end of the address for it to work…
It’s 11:20PM here in Brazil and i thought i’d have to wait to see this tomorrow!
It will come in time…..in the mean time i’m poping bubble wrap from Desktop Bubble Wrap - http://www.desktopbubblewrap.com ….but i’m still hanging out for it….and googles version being launched later this year.
It is 7:22 P. M. PDT. The live broadcast makes it sound like the system is up but there does not seem to be a way to enter a query. Am I missing something?
I know what you guys are trying to pull off is very tough. I applaud your boldness for attempting such a feat live. Certainly not typical of most scientists and engineers and especially IT folk. Don’t listen to the impatient and rude pricks. I for one am very excited but am willing to wait. You guys are heroes!
Thanks for launching Wolfram|Alpha.
Tried a few questions and didn’t get much useful info. And then I tried the Wired article “How many Nobel Prize winners were born under a full moon?” and caught Alpha crashing
“Sorry, Wolfram Alpha is temporarily unavailable. Please try again.”
Well, it is a rough start. I am looking forward to see it working well. I will give it some time.
In the mean time, I am enjoying Stephen’s talk at Berkman center
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5TIOH80Qg7Q
P.S. The talk is cool, but I still need to see Alpha running and answering users’ questions. Good luck.
The main wesite http://www.wolframalpha.com/index.html is not accepting input…
I’m watching your webcast of the launch. Stephen is wondering why you are not seeing more traffic. Well, one reason could be that your basic input page at http://www.wolframalpha.com/index.html is not accepting input!!!! I keeping getting the ‘Launching May 2009′ in the input box.
Was using backdoor and query performance was good. The moment you went live, everything slowed right now. It would take 1 min to get 2+2. Around the time that you mentioned logging got disconnect, queries sped right back up.
I think a lot of people are misunderstanding what this experience is about. It is about trying something new. New doesn’t always work the first time. Let’s see what happens over the next 24 hours.
Hey NV, you’ve got baited breath? Must smell like fish. The expression is “waiting with bated breath.” as in bate — to restrain. Too funny.
Manhattan booted off. That’s okay, glad to see it working at all. Look forward to seeing it become more robust–in every way.
Almost entirely I’m getting that WA doesn’t know what to do with my input.
Working most of the time near Boston MA!
I’m quite impressed. Granted, it doesn’t work as flexibly as I expected, but this is still a powerful proof of concept and an extremely useful tool.
I wouldn’t call it a “google killer”, simply because that’s not what it’s trying to do.
Can’t wait to see what gets added!
I got on briefly before WA failed to respond again…but what I saw in that 1 minute was amazing. The pure density of relevant information for a gene query (eg, APOE) was remarkable! Looking forward to learning more with WA.
Working in Northern VA.
This is amazing! It can be picky about queries, but other than that it’s stunning. I’m excited to see how this will develop further.
Please Dr Wolfram throw some more compute cycles at her, getting a “Sorry Dave, can’t do that beyond capacity” message.
What i saw was flippin brilliant!
Sydney NSW Australia.
Best wished from city of Wuhan, China! I am waiting for it!
Thanks for developing a great research tool for the Internet. Good Luck!
What is going on with the launch? I know you have problems. Why not tell us about them?
The only explanation I found on the net was that the problem was the failure of two systems to work together as expected. How about running initially on one system?
Works oh-so-beautifully here in Australia.
What a concept. I’m blown. It even has accurate data on my tiny home town of Byron Bay…
