stuntprogrammer

7 ms·

31.
by stuntprogrammer 12y ago
For your 128GF I take it you are assuming 1:4 with FP32. That would be unexpected. E.g. in contrast to AMD parts, the recent NV parts based on Maxwell2 (such as GM204 in the gtx980) are 1:32 for FP64:FP32. I would expect that ratio to hold
32.
by stuntprogrammer 12y ago
In this case, I believe it's 1TF of FP16, or 500GFlops FP32. You're likely looking at 16GF FP64. I've also heard, though unconfirmed, that on the CPU side it's quad A57 + quad A53 rather than Denver derivatives.
33.
by stuntprogrammer 12y ago
It's been a while since I've been an insider, and these comments are purely from an outside perspective, interacting with such users. Vertica is seeing use for more historical stuff, and where the time series queries are pretty si
34.
by stuntprogrammer 12y ago
Disclaimers: I was CTO@Kx for a while, but also like InfluxDB :-) It is definitely more finance oriented, though Kx are making moves towards other application areas. Another difference I'd highlight is that Kx concentrate on the core d
35.
by stuntprogrammer 12y ago
From what I've seen, this is true in the middle and lower end but not the higher end.
36.
by stuntprogrammer 12y ago
No, I wouldn't go back. That said, it has made it rather difficult to fit comfortably in standard settings. I've been successful so far but taking Arthur's lessons and applying from various domains, to software, and into clus
37.
by stuntprogrammer 12y ago
Yes, he is that good. I worked directly with him for a few years and it deeply changed my long term approach. Side effect is that it became harder to deal with the "normals" ;-) seriously though, it made me very impatient with the
38.
by stuntprogrammer 15y ago
Is there a cost? Of course. But arguably it's in the noise on these chips. Knights Ferry and Corner are using a scalar x86 core derived from the P54C. How many transistors was that? About 3.3 million. By contrast, Nvidia's 16-core Fermi is
39.
by stuntprogrammer 15y ago
We should distinguish between designing for a benchmark and designing for a set of workloads. Everyone choices representative workloads they care about and evaluate design choices on a variety of metrics from simulating execution of parts o
40.
by stuntprogrammer 15y ago
Sustaining 1TF on DGEMM was explicitly mentioned by Intel in the presentation/briefing. It's also mentioned in the press release: http://newsroom.intel.com/community/intel_newsroom/blog/2011... "The first presentation of the first silicon
41.
by stuntprogrammer 15y ago
It's doing 1TF sustained and no one ever sustains 100% of their theoretical peak, so we know the peak is higher than 1TF. Consider also the sandbagging of number of cores as "50+". How big is the "+"? In reality the design will have a large
42.
by stuntprogrammer 15y ago
A few problems in your comment: 1) The article text is wrong (and doesn't match the pics of the slides). The chip demonstrated today is Knights Corner which is a new part, not the older Knights Ferry SDV. 2) When counting flops we need to d
43.
by stuntprogrammer 15y ago
The AMD 6990 has ~1.37TF double precision, but uses 2 GPU chips to do it, where this chip is that perf level. It is difficult to get good performance out of the GPUs for a very wide range of highly parallel programs. Effectively, you are pr
44.
by stuntprogrammer 15y ago
See my answer just above. tl;dr no more or less than other silicon valley jobs I've had, but then again, I don't expect it to compare to the important stuff in life.
45.
by stuntprogrammer 15y ago
Hmm, I think it depends on what "meaningful" means. I don't mean to break out the Clintonisms but it depends on what you are looking for. I've worked in hardware product firms, software product firms, and trading firms. Is it "meaningful" t
46.
by stuntprogrammer 15y ago
I agree there isn't a perception of them being an enjoyable place to work; I think that is more due to the fact that one isn't really encouraged to talk about it, and the most successful actively avoid the limelight! Now there are plenty of
47.
by stuntprogrammer 15y ago
A /lot/ depends on the fund. I know some that are extremely tech focused as it makes the difference between profitable and not.
48.
by stuntprogrammer 15y ago
CS/STEM. Need not be Ivy League but it certainly doesn't hurt-- though I know a team or two in the top tier that almost have a preference for non-ivy league :-) To be a quantdev or quant, an MFE is far more useful than an MBA.
49.
by stuntprogrammer 15y ago
This is certainly true (I've worked both sides of the fence in terms of types of firm). To add a generalization, my rule of thumb is the variable part of compensation varies most for the domain experts. So in technology for the sake of tech
50.
by stuntprogrammer 15y ago
Yes; it's a properly server oriented processor, with ECC, fast interconnect, large cache, etc.
51.
by stuntprogrammer 15y ago
You can get details on the underlying server architecture from Calxeda's pages describing the system on chip, and the quad server boards that are in the initial HP design: http://calxeda.com/products
52.
by stuntprogrammer 15y ago
In haskell you could write something like this: parMap rseq (\x->/ some long computation /) [1..4] using the standard Control.Parallel.Strategies library (use rwhnf instead of rseq unless you are using v3).
53.
by stuntprogrammer 16y ago
Granted, but it can make sense at even smaller scale. Say 8 servers. Or, I know one group of folks that were tempted by a beefier database machine and instead happily moved to such an appliance. There's a lot of ways to spend dollars that m
54.
by stuntprogrammer 16y ago
Well lets say you are operating at small scale and you can reduce your 32 servers sucking 20 kilowatts to 4 appliances sucking 5kW. Much reduced footprint, power cost, admin cost (at small scale your per server cost is going to be higher th
55.
by stuntprogrammer 16y ago
For a fleet of "scale-down" servers to be practical the first problem is that the admin cost per server must be very low. With, ohhh guesstimate 70,000+ servers, Facebook presumably has that metric under control. Next, certain types of work
56.
by stuntprogrammer 16y ago
Well just in case you wanna cry into your beer over that font - you can get it here for old times sake. http://www.aplusdev.org/Download/x11fonts.tar.gz
57.
by stuntprogrammer 16y ago
True - joel kaplan's group in FID was the source iirc.
58.
by stuntprogrammer 16y ago
Historically there has been some truly awful code, no doubt, and much still being written. There is a growing breed of trader though who can code well. Coding well in a variety of languages is becoming a basic skill along with advanced math
59.
by stuntprogrammer 16y ago
APL isn't all that weird once you spend a little time with it. It's "just" a dynamically typed collection-oriented language. I think people look at some screenshots, make a stupid joke since they aren't familiar with the notation, and move
60.
by stuntprogrammer 16y ago
There's a long history of using alternative in-house languages at Wall St. firms (and new ones are being developed at a few large firms I know).

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