Author Archives: pappp

China’s new(ish) SW26010-Pro supercomputer at SC23

Posted on 2023-11-24 by pappp

Source: OSNews

Article note: Interesting. It appears to be a paper tiger whose memory system can't possibly feed its execution units. There are a lot of computers where this is true to some degree (almost all GPU heavy systems have "implausible" arithmetic:memory and arithmetic:memory bandwidth ratios even with fancy later-model HBM controllers and such), but this is (1) way worse and (2) across international relations boundaries that encourage rather than discourage pointing out the BS.

Sunway’s new supercomputer therefore feels like a system designed with the goal of landing high on some TOP500 lists. For that purpose, it’s perfect, providing a lot of throughput without wasting money on pesky things like cache, out-of-order execution, and high bandwidth memory. But from the perspective of solving a nation’s problems, I feel like Sunway is chasing a metric. A nation doing well in advanced technology might have a lot of supercomputer throughput, but more supercomputer throughput doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll solve technological problems faster.

A detailed look at China’s new supercomputer. The conclusion quoted above is very well supported by the data and research concerning this new supercomputer, and the article is a great read.

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Paper: You Want My Password or a Dead Patient?

Posted on 2023-11-24 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: The usual maxim that the larger the distance between the people selecting the software and the people using the software, the worse the outcomes will be applies, but there is some extra-special nonsense here. The intersection of srs bsns computer security practices and actual life-critical systems makes for some really interesting should-be-obvious failure modes and workarounds, though.
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We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to return to OpenAI

Posted on 2023-11-22 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: As the tiny incestuous techbro world turns. Did the old board ingest too much of their own regulatory-capture-generating fearmongering? Did Microsoft find a new version of EEE? Was it some sort of sabotage? Did some dumb personal squabble just get way out of hand? Does anything about this matter _at all_ to anyone except for investors in the hype cycle?
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SC’23 Notes

Posted on 2023-11-21 by pappp
The entryway to the SC23 conference at the Colorado Convention Center

I got talked into going to SC again this year, as I have almost every year since 2009.
It’s not really my area of focus, but it’s always interesting.

UK's booth at SC'23, featuring the KES PBP demo.


UK’s presence featured a mixture of IT/CCS types and researchers, the research end of the booth was mostly focused on ongoing Parallel Bit Pattern Computing work, featuring a new demo/visualization thing that I built much of the hardware and some of the software for in the 3 weeks before we left for the conference (the rest came from Hank modelling some printable parts, pulling the compute engine from an older demo he wrote, and building some adapter code). It was more exhausting than the conference itself, but a really fun prototyping/micomanufacturing flex. Fancy 3D printed parts, 2020 extrusion, some laser cut bits, piles of addressable LEDs, a bit of embedded electronics. There is also a partially-functional prototype backplane to link 4 EBAZ425 FPGA boards through an Aggregate Function Network as a PBP substrate that …I designed. There’s a lot of not-my-job work I did on display; I should probably start throwing more of a fit about that.

Some notes about the stuff we were showing and interesting(?) industry observations below.

Continue reading →
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Hundreds of OpenAI employees threaten to resign and join Microsoft

Posted on 2023-11-20 by pappp

Source: The Verge - All Posts

Article note: Definitely a real, mature industry and not some investors flailing in a hype cycle. Microsoft is making out on the whole situation though.
Photo of Satya Nadella standing in front of a sign that reads Microsoft loves OpenAI
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella onstage at Ignite 2023 in November. | Image: Microsoft

Most of the staff at OpenAI have threatened to resign from the company and join Microsoft, which has hired ousted OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and former OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman to lead a new “advanced AI research team.” In a letter to OpenAI’s board that was reported on this morning by Wired and journalist Kara Swisher, more than 500 current OpenAI staffers say that “Microsoft has assured us that there are positions for all OpenAI employees at this new subsidiary should we choose to join.”

The letter says the OpenAI employees will leave if the board does not reinstate Altman and Brockman and then resign. But seeing as the board has already made its choice, deciding to remain in place and naming a new CEO, while Altman and Brockman head...

Continue reading…

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YouTube artificially slows down video load times when using Firefox

Posted on 2023-11-20 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Fuckers. It even seems like it might be adblocking evasion/detection related. It's a huge invitation for regulatory scrutiny that they'll no doubt weasel out of if it even starts.
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Defence against scientific fraud: a proposal for a new MSc course

Posted on 2023-11-19 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: This would be excellent for society, because from where I'm sitting academia is rife with fraud and "fraud-adjacent" behavior. ... and with the amount of fraud adjacent behavior more or less required to compete with fraud-enabled expectations of academic career arcs, it doesn't matter how much you train people, they're still incentivized to behave in fraud-adjacent ways.
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Supersize Your Intel 4004 By Over 10 Times

Posted on 2023-11-17 by pappp

Source: Hack a Day

Article note: That's beautiful.
The masks with which the Intel 4004 was fabricated
A PCB covered in discrete transistors with light shining through it
This is quite a bit bigger than the original 12mm² die.

The Intel 4004 was among the first microprocessors and one of the first to use the MOS silicon-gate technology. In the decades long race to build bigger CPUs, it’s been mostly forgotten. Forgotten that is, until [Klaus Scheffler] supersized it over ten-fold!

The project took about 2 years to complete and re-creates it faithfully – all 2,300 transistors included – enough to run software written for the Intel 4004. But the idea for this project isn’t unique and dates all the way back to 2000, so what gives? Turning a bunch of masks for silicon fabrication into a schematic is actually harder than it seems! [Tim McNerney] originally came up with the idea to make a giant 4004 for its “35th anniversary”. [Tim] managed to convince Intel to give him schematics and other drawings and would in return make an exhibit for Intel’s museum. With the schematic straight from [Frederico Faggin], software analysis tools from [Lajos Kintli] and [Klaus Scheffler] to actually build the thing, they did what [Frederico] did in one year without CAD, but in two with modern tools.

The full story by [Tim] is a lot longer and it’s definitely worth a read.

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Half-Life 25th Anniversary Update

Posted on 2023-11-17 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Cool!
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Reptar

Posted on 2023-11-14 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Welp, that's a pretty clear sign that the vast accretion of inconsistent bullshit in modern x86 family parts has made the ISA practically impossible to implement properly. Doesn't sound like anyone has found anything other than a crash once the microcode enters the glitch state, but is sure is an interesting window into the implementation.
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