31–40 of 265 posts
Why do we need more computer power? I haven't upgraded my laptop since 2009 (well, I've replaced its HDD with an SSD 2 years ago and it made a huge difference) and I'm okay. Some people insist on photorealistic 3D graphics in the games they play, I agree that's cool but wouldn't say that's anything close to important.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even if the software only needs to respond at a certain speed, scale will quickly make you either pay through the nose for better hardware or optimize the software so that it can respond in a small fraction of the original speed. The trick, as always, is finding balance between paying for hardware and paying developers.
But that is the case now too and in my experience it swung to paying through the nose for hardware in general; as more or less a sidetrack I take on projects where I optimise (mostly online) systems. Example; a few weeks ago a startup asked me to check out their setup as they were spending almost 30k$/mo on AWS. I spent a few days optimising and now they are down to less than 10k$. With some more work it will be a fe…
That's like, a couple full-time developers, AIUI? Maybe even less than that. Perhaps the people who say "people are more expensive than hardware" have a point - at least in the Bay Area. Or you can move to the Rust Belt if you'd like a change.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But that is the case now too and in my experience it swung to paying through the nose for hardware in general; as more or less a sidetrack I take on projects where I optimise (mostly online) systems. Example; a few weeks ago a startup asked me to check out their setup as they were spending almost 30k$/mo on AWS. I spent a few days optimising and now they are down to less than 10k$. With some more work it will be a fe…
> almost 30k$/mo That's like, a couple full-time developers, AIUI? Maybe even less than that. Perhaps the people who say "people are more expensive than hardware" have a point - at least in the Bay Area. Or you can move to the Rust Belt if you'd like a change.
Why do we need more computer power? I haven't upgraded my laptop since 2009 (well, I've replaced its HDD with an SSD 2 years ago and it made a huge difference) and I'm okay. Some people insist on photorealistic 3D graphics in the games they play, I agree that's cool but wouldn't say that's anything close to important.
It’s critical for a lot of scientific and industrial applications. Too many things just can’t be done without a supercomputer.
My philosophy at the moment is to use HPC only when I've exhausted other possibilities. I think many people jump to HPC prematurely. The simpler approaches are so much cheaper that I think it's usually worthwhile. I'm skeptical of the argument that it's cheaper to use HPC than it is to use more efficient methods in this case, because the more efficient methods are often something like a few days spent reading to find the right equation or existing experimental data vs. at least that much setting up a simulation and longer to run it.
Edit: Bill Rider has a bunch of blog posts that make similar points:
https://wjrider.wordpress.com/2016/06/27/we-have-already-los...
https://wjrider.wordpress.com/2015/12/25/the-unfortunate-myt...
https://wjrider.wordpress.com/2016/05/04/hpc-is-just-a-tool-...
https://wjrider.wordpress.com/2016/11/17/a-single-massive-ca...
https://wjrider.wordpress.com/2014/02/28/why-algorithms-and-...
I just don't buy this. I cut my teeth as a HPC programmer working with C and writing no-lock algorithms. There will always be a need for that, but realistically the vast majority of software being developed is simply not performance-critical. It's designed to work at human speed. Advances in language, compiler, and runtime implementations will continue to keep up with any growth in the need for performant application…
It would be great if most applications worked at human speed. Instead we have web applications taking 5 seconds to load what is basically 3 records from a small database.
I understand that 3D has thermal issues but couldn't this be prevented by increasing (dead) dark silicon and maybe water cooling inside the 3D chip?
Not directly comparable but brains are state of the art of computing and are tri-dimensionals.
There are exceptions to this, as with everything, but it's not as easy as this article makes it sound, i.e. "Just make faster stuff dummy!" There's always a cost.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But that is the case now too and in my experience it swung to paying through the nose for hardware in general; as more or less a sidetrack I take on projects where I optimise (mostly online) systems. Example; a few weeks ago a startup asked me to check out their setup as they were spending almost 30k$/mo on AWS. I spent a few days optimising and now they are down to less than 10k$. With some more work it will be a fe…
You're quite right that there's plenty to optimize. It's not that there isn't money in optimizing. It's that there's often not _enough_ money in optimizing to rise to the level of the top N priorities for a business.
[0] http://datadraw.sourceforge.net/ (github; https://github.com/waywardgeek/datadraw as sourceforge seems down)
Edit; maybe I answered that last question by finding a github version: seems waywardgeek does maintain at least to keep it running.
Why do we need more computer power? I haven't upgraded my laptop since 2009 (well, I've replaced its HDD with an SSD 2 years ago and it made a huge difference) and I'm okay. Some people insist on photorealistic 3D graphics in the games they play, I agree that's cool but wouldn't say that's anything close to important.
It’s critical for a lot of scientific and industrial applications. Too many things just can’t be done without a supercomputer.
And by the way I believe the software code is not the only place which could be made more efficient. What if we removed all the legacy stuff from the x86 architecture - wouldn't it become more efficient? What if we designed a new CPU with a particular modern programming language and advanced high-level computer science concepts in mind - wouldn't it make writing efficient code easier?
Also, what are the actual tasks we need so much number-crunching power for, besides things of questionable value like face recognition, deep-fake, passwords cracking and algorithmic trading?