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GPUs Mine Astronomical Datasets for Golden Insight Nuggets

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Re: GPUs Mine Astronomical Datasets for Golden Insight Nuggets

#11
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If distributed computing had a fraction of time on the millions of GPUs mining cryptocurrencies, I can't imagine how close we'd be to curing disease and finding ET.

Time for a cryptocurrency for F@H?

Relevant: https://golem.network/

Re: GPUs Mine Astronomical Datasets for Golden Insight Nuggets

#12
post #2

This makes me curious – remember back in the oughts where SETI@Home and Folding@Home were popular? Were those adapted for GPUs and saw a huge acceleration in calculations?

Molecular dynamics has been using GPUs for much longer than Machine Learning. Yes, the accelerations are enormous.

Re: GPUs Mine Astronomical Datasets for Golden Insight Nuggets

#13
post #3
post #2

This makes me curious – remember back in the oughts where SETI@Home and Folding@Home were popular? Were those adapted for GPUs and saw a huge acceleration in calculations?

If distributed computing had a fraction of time on the millions of GPUs mining cryptocurrencies, I can't imagine how close we'd be to curing disease and finding ET.

And achieving world peace and developing nuclear fusion power. Knock off the hyperbole.

Re: GPUs Mine Astronomical Datasets for Golden Insight Nuggets

#14
post #12
post #2

This makes me curious – remember back in the oughts where SETI@Home and Folding@Home were popular? Were those adapted for GPUs and saw a huge acceleration in calculations?

Molecular dynamics has been using GPUs for much longer than Machine Learning. Yes, the accelerations are enormous.

Linear Algebra libraries have been using GPUs for longer than molecular dynamics. What's your point?

Re: GPUs Mine Astronomical Datasets for Golden Insight Nuggets

#15
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Molecular dynamics has been using GPUs for much longer than Machine Learning. Yes, the accelerations are enormous.

Linear Algebra libraries have been using GPUs for longer than molecular dynamics. What's your point?

That doesn't jibe with my memory - the first codes running on GPUs at the supercomputer centers that had privileged early access were running MD, without any GPU-accelerated LA libraries.

Re: GPUs Mine Astronomical Datasets for Golden Insight Nuggets

#16
post #3
post #2

This makes me curious – remember back in the oughts where SETI@Home and Folding@Home were popular? Were those adapted for GPUs and saw a huge acceleration in calculations?

If distributed computing had a fraction of time on the millions of GPUs mining cryptocurrencies, I can't imagine how close we'd be to curing disease and finding ET.

I've thought of setting up a pool for deep learning. I think there could be an interest in using GPUs for other than coin mining.

Re: GPUs Mine Astronomical Datasets for Golden Insight Nuggets

#17
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If distributed computing had a fraction of time on the millions of GPUs mining cryptocurrencies, I can't imagine how close we'd be to curing disease and finding ET.

Time for a cryptocurrency for F@H?

The problem of replacing the general purpose proof of work in cryptocurrencies (finding partial SHA256 collisions in the case of Bitcoin) with something more useful is that the attributes for a good PoW computation are hard to find in real world distributed problems.

In particular you want something a problem with the following attributes:

- must derive somehow from the block data you're trying to mine, otherwise you could reuse your work for an different block and make double-spend attacks trivial. It's very important that once a new block is mined everybody else must start from scratch for the next one, otherwise you could "premine" an arbitrary number of blocks and later append them at an arbitrary position in the block "tree", potentially rewriting history.

- difficulty should easily be modifiable to account for the current "hashrate" otherwise your blockrate will go whack as the amount of computing power available changes. It also means that you should be able ahead of time to guess the difficulty of a problem and the average amount of processing power required to solve it.

- easy to validate: the nodes of the network should be able to check that the proof of work is valid using a tiny fraction of the computing power necessary to actually produce the proof (finding hash collisions is hard, verifying them is comparatively trivial).

- doesn't require access to a centralized resource. If you need to connect to some central repository to fetch the work set then not everybody is on equal footing. You have a single point of failure and some miners could have privileged access to the work data.

It's very difficult to find real world problems that have all these attributes.

Re: GPUs Mine Astronomical Datasets for Golden Insight Nuggets

#20

Can we please never use the phrase "data nuggets" again

'How are your Golden Insight Nuggets today?'

'I've been collecting all these great Golden Insight Nuggets.'

God it's horrible.

Why not just: "GPUs Mine Astronomical Datasets for Golden Insights"

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