Software That Helps Power Siri Is Named After Iron Man's AI, JARVIS

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The VergeThe Verge logo.Software that helps power Siri is named after Iron Man’s AI, JARVISComments DrawerCommentsLoading commentsGetting the conversation ready...

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Software that helps power Siri is named after Iron Man’s AI, JARVISby Dante D'OrazioClose

Dante D'Orazio

Reporter, The VergeLast published Apr 11, 2016

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Apr 26, 2015, 4:29 PM UTC

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Remember JARVIS, the hyper-intelligent AI from the Iron Man movies? Well, it seems Apple’s engineers used that sci-fi software for some inspiration when building the backbone that powers Siri.

At an engineer meet-up last week in Cupertino, Apple revealed that the servers that run Siri use Apache Mesos. The open source software, first developed out of UC Berkeley, is designed to make massive data centers more efficient and easier to manage. Among other duties, Mesos determines the best way to complete tasks with all of the resources in a data center. (Mesos is credited with helping Twitter abolish the fail whale, an error screen that plagued the service during times of high server load.) The software also allows engineers to push updates to services like Siri as if they were working with a single computer — instead of thousands of servers.

And guess what name Apple gave its custom implementation of Mesos? You guessed it: JARVIS. But while Tony Stark’s JARVIS stands for Just A Rather Very Intelligent System, Apple’s acronym replaces “System” for the more apropos “Scheduler.” Now, if only Siri were a true AI.

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