While I absolutely love the concept and really want to buy a graphics card just to play with this on my development box. Find it quite exciting how some applications are utilising graphics processing power.
But I can't help but wonder what the sys admin's response is going to be when I start asking for additional graphics cards being added to his perfectly built 2U database servers!
Which makes me wonder about the influence on the performance per watt ratio of such GPU-based solutions. To my knowledge, beefy cards are pretty power-hungry.
That GPU has 12 cores, in the same way a desktop CPU has 4 cores. Number of units with concurrent independent execution flow. Very wide and a lot of execution resources yes. Maybe even 5x computing power of a desktop CPU considering clock frequency as well.
"2300+ cores" is a VERY misleading way to represent GPU resources. You could also say GTX780 has 12 cores with 1/3rd clock frequency is an equally unfair and equally "true" way to express it, if you were trying to suggest CPUs are "better".
doing very little times 2300 in parallel is sort of the point though. if you have a parallel optimized job (like sum/agg of many rows/table), it is stupid difficult to make fast on a complex CPU where most of the execution paths remain unused. you must wait for the instruction pipeline to clear, and you can only process so many ops per cycle (whats a popular core count now on a big cpu system? 48-96 threads i think my UCS blades can run). when you are talking THOUSANDS of cores on a weee baby 250w GPU card, of which I can put TWO OF in each system? That is enormously powerful for those parallel tasks.
In that case my 4 core is really -- waves hands -- a 576 core system. 4 cores, maybe 2 AVX 8-wide instructions execute 2 * 8 * 4 and maybe 3 stages are in flight. And 3x the clock. Or something. So I'm getting roughly comparable completely meaningless 2 * 8 * 4 * 3 * 3 cores.
I'm not suggesting CPU resources should be counted like that, but that's closer to have GPU resources are counted. Sure, it sounds impressive, but does that 2304 cores really represent fair truth to, say, 4 CPU cores?
Is that completely apples-to-apples? Probably not since the Xeon is probably talking about double precision floating point versus single precision on the GPU. But for a lot of database applications which don't involve money, single precision floats have a sufficient level of accuracy for the performance improvement to be attractive.
Yeah the performance isn't 100x like it used to be but it's still enough that if you have racks and racks full of machines a 3-10x improvement could be really substantial. Going from $10k/mo in rent to $1k/mo in rent at a datacenter could make or break an early stage startup.
Further as things get cheaper they get used a lot more. Scientists have only two models: the ones they can run but don't really like and the ones they want to run. Adding fidelity to modeling codes isn't an absolute good but it's hard to argue that it makes the world worse.
Sorry about that, we had lots of trouble with WebGL in Chrome under Yosemite. It did seem to clear up with a new release from Google a few days ago.
The click-drag interaction on desktop is slightly goofy. We discussed adding cursor key and clickable arrows for previous and next, but concluded that it wasn't that bad. It's super nice on touchpads and touch.
While it looks really nice, there is no way I could submit/deploy a project with that kind of licence bundled in the source code.
Guess you could just change the name etc but that's not really the point!
If one of the corporate legal team picked up on this there would probably be a small shit storm following!
DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE
Version 2, December 2004
Copyright (C) 2004 Sam Hocevar <sam@hocevar.net>
Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim or modified
copies of this license document, and changing it is allowed as long
as the name is changed.
DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE
TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR COPYING, DISTRIBUTION AND MODIFICATION
0. You just DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO.
If that really is the only barrier to using this then I'm sure a simple email to the sole copyright holder asking for an MIT/BSD/etc license to the code would solve your problem.
The author put together what looks like a nice library, let's not make an issue out of something so trivial to solve.
I always wear shirt and tie to the interview then ask about dress code as if they expect me to sit there developing suited and booted I'm not the guy for the job!
Thanks for this, currently a PHP contractor looking for work in the UK and this certainly opens my eyes up to the issues with my CV. Probably explains why I haven't been getting many interviews!
What would you suggest for a contractors CV which is primarily filled with 1-2 month contracts?
I usually try get the last years work on the CV, but as you can imagine that starts to take up quite a bit of room when you have many short term contracts.
I would portray as one role, and a few really important projects.
For example:
Senior Consultant
For the past 24 months, I've worked with a large number of varied clients to realise true business value for them.
This has included Real Example A and Specific Detail B, but beyond the pure technical skills, it has highlighted the value of softer skills.
Most notably, I recently worked with the estate of Douglas Adams in an ecommerce towel distribution hub.
Don't panic, I'm the right chap for the job.
I put seperate contracts on as seperate jobs and find getting PHP jobs hilariously easy. People do ask why I change jobs so often, but the standard "I'm a contractor and finance dept don't wanna pay our rates" goes down well enough.
This is my CV, I try to be straight to the point and keep it under 2 pages on the word version.
Nice to see an independent review to back this up! Keep meaning to nip down to the Apple store and have a look but a little concerned I'll be coming home with one!
But until we have DP1.3 and external matching 5K thunderbolt display this really isn't for me. The authors comments regarding the previous thunderbolt display "However, the Retina display does make things on the other 2560x1440 displays look… a little grody." really do put me off.
Some interesting points but I personally don't agree with most of them.
Time machine, I personally hated the previous interface. Always felt it was clunky and slow.
Icons are pretty poor but they are so small on my screen it's something I can live with.
The font! Oh where to begin, after using this font for hours on end now I thought I would have got use to it, but something just isn't quite right with it!
* beginning of wine-fueled rant *
Overall I personally am still in a mixed opinion on Yosemite, it took almost 2 days to get my work machines (iMac 2011 and rMBP 2014) back into a usable state.
Almost everything was broken, network drivers (I use 10GbE), my IDE, VM environments, file sync, backups.
But worse of all they seem to have changed the mouse acceleration settings! As a long time suffer of RSI/Carpal Tunnel Syndrome I have learnt to manage it so well that most of the time I forget I even suffer with this.
One of the best ways for me to manage it was to purchase a Razer Mamba mouse, which worked flawlessly in Mavericks. Installed Yosemite and the mouse was unusable even on the mouses slowest setting, tried another mouse, same issue. Completely unusable!
After spending hours upon hours searching for a solution and setting my RSI off to levels which I couldn't sleep for 2 days! I finally found the USBOverdrive app which lets me control the accelerations to something which matches Mavericks.
One week later I am still suffering with pretty bad pain in my wrist!
Nice, do you mind sharing which region you work in?
I'm in the midlands and lucky to get £350 and have been pretty lucky to work with some huge brand names to make my portfolio shine, but clearly this isn't enough!
Even with years of ZF experience I still seem to struggle to find good interesting contracts in the region.
I'm in Birmingham. There isn't much dev. work in the West Midlands in my experience. Most of our work comes from London and further afield. Rates depend on the nature of the work, but 2-4x what you quote is a reasonable range. (I work primarily with Scala. I don't do paid work 5 days a week as I have longer term projects to work on.)
Yeah that is primarily London, i live in Edinburgh where theres next to no work but typically work in London. Although i've had the odd contract up here or remote for decent money. I'm flexible down to £350 a day if its an interesting project to me.
