Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2026-01-29:/2451557] "Slopaganda: AI images posted by the White House and what they teach us"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2026-01-29:/2451518] "SpaceX in Merger Talks with xAI"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2026-01-27:/2450683] "Albania Created an ‘A.I. Minister’ to Curb Corruption. Then Its Developers Were Accused of Graft."
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2026-01-27:/2450729] "Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2026-01-25:/2450237] "FAA institutes nationwide drone no-fly zones around ICE operations"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2026-01-23:/2449737] "Microsoft Gave FBI Keys to Unlock Encrypted Data, Exposing Major Privacy Flaw"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2026-01-20:/2448840] "Immigration Agencies Are Openly Defying Federal Courts"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2026-01-14:/2447163] "SparkFun Officially Dropping AdaFruit due to CoC Violation"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2026-01-09:/2445771] "Logistics Is Dying; Or – Dude, Where's My Mail?"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2026-01-06:/2444687] "Researcher Wipes White Supremacist Dating Sites, Leaks Data on okstupid.lol – Hackread – Cybersecurity News, Data Breaches, AI, and More"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2026-01-05:/2444673] "Dell is eating humble pie and bringing back the XPS brand"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2026-01-05:/2444589] "PicoPCMCIA leverages the Raspberry Pi RP2350 to emulate a PCMCIA card"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2026-01-05:/2444396] "ICE is using facial-recognition technology to quickly arrest people"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2026-01-04:/2444185] "Developing a BLAS Library for the AMD AI Engine [pdf]"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2026-01-03:/2444143] "Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-12-27:/2442641] "Researchers develop a camera that can focus on different distances at once"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-12-22:/2441759] "Anna’s Archive Backed Up Spotify, Plans to Release 300TB Music Archive"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-12-20:/2441389] "Big GPUs don't need big PCs"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-12-18:/2440782] "The D.N.C. Is Scrapping Its Report on What Went Wrong in 2024"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-12-17:/2440388] "Coursera to combine with Udemy"
SC13 – PAPPP's Rambling
https://pappp.net
Hacking, Geekery, and life in Academia.Tue, 07 Jan 2014 07:23:28 +0000en-US
hourly
1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.8.5SC13 Retrospective
https://pappp.net/?p=1329
https://pappp.net/?p=1329#respondFri, 03 Jan 2014 02:22:33 +0000http://pappp.net/?p=1329Continue reading →]]>Posting up my notes from SC13 is another thing I didn’t get to during the end of the semester. Remedying now.
The main takeaway sequence from conversations on the floor is as such:
The era of single-core performance gains is already over.
Furthermore, the era of usable single-die performance for MIMD machines is coming to an end.
Therefore, big machines are going to be getting physically bigger… to the point where connection lengths are a problem (everything is Infiniband, and Infiniband doesn’t tolerate long runs well)
There is a LOT of cooling effort to make the necessary density happen – central large fan systems, immersion cooling, closed-circuit water gear, etc.
The other really exciting thing that it seems AMD is going to make it, and more. Their lean period finished when the payoff on the XBone/PS4 came in, and they have a VERY good plan for the next >2 years. It works with the premise above about single-core/die MIMD performance ending, and points in the HSA direction – this is the crazy parts with MMUs so a CPU and GPU can share memory without skew penalty and such. ARM and partners are also generally pointed that way, and have been for some time, though apparently AMD isn’t getting out of the x86 game, but it does look like they are getting out of the fat core game.
Interesting Conversations:
As always, many of the best things at conferences are the conversations that happen. A couple particularly good ones:
Vojtěch Pavlík (Director, SuSE Labs)
I was one of the only people to show up for an in-booth talk about the kernel update process, so it ended up being less of a talk and more of a conversation about the computing ecosystem. The person slated to give the talk was Vojtěch Pavlík, the director of SuSE labs, who had very interesting things to say. We agree on the idea that you can generally blame the graphics vendors for many problems in the stack (related to the intended talk; OOB modules are the maintenance problem), another round of the “The era of substantially-increasing single core performance is over” discussion, some interesting thoughts about NUMA and the fact that suddenly storage is getting faster relative to the rest of the components, which changes things system-wide. We also talked about the general problems with ever-growing cache hierarchies. On the way out, their booth boss handed me an unusually nice backpack full of awesome swag on my way out, so I’ve got a SuSE hat to go with my Redhat cap, and one of the stuffed chameleons for my FOSS mascot menagerie and whatnot.
Anderas Olofsson (CEO of Adapteva)
Adepteva manufactures many-core RISC parts. He stopped by our booth drawn by the meta-state conversion/mog/nanocontroller stuff. Wants to know if we want a university program participation, because we have compiler tech that might do us both good. Option for free toys. (This is the parallela “$100 supercomputer” people. He had one of the boards riding around in his pocket.)
Miachel Wolfe (Senior Engineer, PGI)
While I was doing the demo circuit (for a shirt) in the PGI booth, Michael Wolfe was actually doing one of the demos himself. I mentioned that I am a compilers person checking out what they’re up to, he checks the badge, says “Oh, you’re one of Hank’s. That’s all right, we’ll talk to you anyway” and gives a bitchy, pointed version of the demo. I still don’t entirely understand why they dislike each other so much, but apparently it goes way back. Kind of amusing.
Burton Smith ( MSR and/or “Whatever he wants”)
We ran into Burton on the way back from dinner. He seems to have become bored with the elliptic optimization thing (with idle process (power conservation) as a task rather than resource) he was working on for the last couple years (which was itself kind of amazing), and MSR provided him access to one of the D-Wave quantum machines. He’s working on programming models that handle the destructive-reads situation and various other constraints well, and is in particular working with Refined Languages … aka, the thing Hank earned his PhD for. I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone be paternalistic toward Hank like that (“I’ve been trying a refined languages approach from someone’s PhD *smirk*”) or get flattered/embarrassed that way before. Randy seemed to have the same impression because he gave Hank some crap about it. I haven’t read as deeply about that as I should, but I think I get the general idea.
One last note on people: There were young, American, and very technically sophisticated women on the floor in non-trivial numbers. That was extremely refreshing.
And finally, The Swag Review:
This is what I shipped back.
Textile swag.
This year’s bag haul. The little insulated thing from Lockheed should be genuinely useful.
White papers, catalogs, product documentation, etc.
Various stationary type objects.
Strictly toys. The little rocket in the bag was made on one of the fancy color 3D printers.
Tool-type swag. Adepteva’s lighted screwdriver is extremely nice. Half the USB devices present themselves as HDI devices rather than having significant storage.
The bag of goodies I got form Suse.
]]>https://pappp.net/?feed=rss2&p=13290Heterogeneous System Architecture
https://pappp.net/?p=1313
https://pappp.net/?p=1313#respondSat, 23 Nov 2013 05:56:55 +0000http://pappp.net/?p=1313Continue reading →]]>Post-SC, I sat down to do some deeper reading on the HSA (Heterogeneous System Architecture) stuff. This is AMD/ARM (and many friends)’s plan for the future, and it is pretty fucking exciting (in an obscure technical sort of way).
The best starting point I found is this year old whitepaper [PDF warning]. They’re using slightly odd terminology, the important bits are LCU = Latency Compute Unit = Conventional MIMD CPU Core, TCU = Throughput Compute Unit = Accelerator, typically SIMD-engine-ish like a GPU, HSAIL = HSA Intermediate Language = IR that can be compiled at install/run time to accelerator’s ISAs. The hardware-side implementation details are nowhere to be found, but there are a lot of seriously exciting model-affecting things detailed on the software side. The general model, with things broken into grid, work group, work item, wavefront is FAR more sane than most of the parallel schemes (I’m thinking specifically of the awful CUDA nomenclature). Internally, the exciting stuff includes requiring a limited sort of preemption on the accelerators, a relaxed consistency model across memory shared over a whole system (nice thread-like shared memory), an intermediate low level language/VM for portability, and assurances about barrier capability in the TCU. The actual objects are basically FAT ELFs with a complete copy of the program for the LCU, plus the HSAIL representation for the parts that can be shipped to TCUs. I’m pleased that there seems to be a clever run-time that does a bunch of platform enumeration and controls where parts run in a rule-automated-but-overrideable way.
I had some folks at SC tell me they’d try to get me a more implementation-focused whitepaper on the hardware side at AMD but they weren’t sure if/when details would be clear for distribution. On the software side, the details are in a published draft of the ISA/Model/Compiler Writer’s Guide that I browsed around in a bit and found very enlightening. The reference tool-chain seems to be mostly built on LLVM and OpenCL.
I have some other SC-related thoughts to share, but I want to get them a little bit more refined (and decide which are for public consumption) before I post.
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https://pappp.net/?p=1310#commentsSat, 16 Nov 2013 02:32:47 +0000http://pappp.net/?p=1310Continue reading →]]>I will be at SC’13 November 16-21 with the aggregate.org/University of Kentucky research exhibit again this year in booth 629. Media and impressions should appear somewhere in my ‘net presence during and after the conference, it is always a good show. Edit:Pushing photos from the show floor into this album.
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