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Comment Re:That's it? (Score 4, Informative) 67

I saw this poster at the conference and I was not impressed and in fact it was one of the weaker posters that I saw at the conference (it was light on details and had some of the information on the poster when talking about GPU's in general was not entirely accurate). It is really a poster that should not have been at SC at all. While it is interesting in the network sense the amount of data they can process is not anywhere close to the amount that is actually flowing through these large scale machines (up to 10 GB/sec per node) and there was no information about scaling this data collection (which would be needed at extreme scales) to obtain meaningful information to allow for tuning of network performance.

This poster should have been at a networking conference where the results would have been much more interesting to the crowd attending. Also of note, IIRC the author was using a traditional GPU programming model for computation that is not efficient for this style of computation. The speedup numbers would have been greatly improved by using a RPC style model of programming for the GPU (persistent kernel with tasking from pinned pages). However this is not something I totally fault the author for not using since it is a rather obscure programming technique for GPU's at this time.

Comment HPC? (Score 5, Insightful) 54

"Supercomputing applications tend to require cores to work in concert with each other, which is why IBM, Cray, and other companies have built incredibly fast interconnects. Cycle's work with the Amazon cloud has focused on HPC workloads without that requirement." While this is cool, Can you really call something like this an HPC system if you are picking work loads that require little cross node communication? The requirement of cross node communication is pretty much the whole reason large scale HPC machines like ORNL's Titan exist at all. Wouldn't this system be classified closer to HTC because it is targeting workloads that are similar to those which would be able to run on HTC Condor pools?

Comment Re:Their API's are exactly what you would expect (Score 1) 53

No kidding. They have the absolute WORST API documentation of any product i have ever used. Its slightly better now (in Arc 9 good luck finding documentation to do anything non-standard). However this problem does extend beyond ESRI since it seems like documentation in this entire software sector is pretty shitty (OGC is better but not great).

Comment Re:Suck it down (Score 2) 121

I wouldn't jump the gun on this yet. While it is a really promising sign that devkits are making their way out, the post on Ouya's site has something quite concerning. "The dev consoles aren’t cheap for us to make." No one claimed they couldn't make this console. Most of the issues brought up was that people doubted that they would able to make it cheap enough to meet a $100 price tag (dev kits were $699+ each).

Comment Re:Quantity over quality (Score 1) 441

Because some (or most) new software engineers hadn't really worked real jobs prior to their new careers and believe that because the company provides food that they instantly care about your well being. This is not the case. I am not saying to go screw over your employer, but you should know not to be screwed over by them.
The Internet

Submission + - Researchers Prove Everybody Loves an Underdog

Active Seti writes: "Everybody loves an underdog: Texans at the Alamo, the Greeks at Thermopylae, Apple Computer in the 1980's and 90's, or Rocky Balboa. Those who are viewed as disadvantaged arouse our sense of fairness and justice — principles that matter to most people. Researchers also found that people tend to believe that underdogs put forth more effort than top-dogs. Although favorable evaluations disappear when underdog status no longer applies, politicians and computers can still get a lot of mileage out of underdog status as when Apple aired it's original 1984 ads — ads that have recently been copied by political campaigns. The original paper shows the methodology (pdf) used to test the premise."
Windows

Submission + - Windows XP driver support begins to end (blorge.com) 3

thefickler writes: "It's official, manufacturers are starting to dump Windows XP support entirely and some new models won't even have Windows XP drivers or any kind of support available, anywhere. One reader, "Mark" contacted TECH.BLORGE regarding installing Windows XP on his HP V6610 (Australian) laptop which is the V6620 in the US. "Mark" said when he went to the HP driver/downloads section that very few Windows XP drivers were available for it and he was right, there were almost no useful drivers for the laptop there. His call to HP support didn't get very far as "HP is no longer supporting Windows XP on the newer PCs.""
Supercomputing

Submission + - Nuke Lab + Supercomputers = Truth Behind Tunguska (popularmechanics.com)

malachiorion writes: It's no Roswell, but the Tunguska event, a June 30, 1908, explosion that cleared an 800-sq.-mi. swath of Siberian forest, remains a hot topic for the X-Files set. Was it a UFO crash? An alien weapons test? Now, Sandia National Laboratories has released its own explanation for the event. Using supercomputers to create a 3D simulation of the explosion, the Department of Energy-funded nuke lab determined that Tunguska was, indeed, the result of a relatively small asteroid. Even if you don't care in the slightest, the terrifying simulation videos are well worth checking out.

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