Life by Bits & Numbers

It seems that GPU computing is becoming more and more ubiquitous. Tools are becoming better and better, the applications are becoming wider and wider and the hardware is becoming faster and faster too.

CPU are steadily gaining in productivity. It’s a steadily rising curve. Is it good news though? Depends how you look at it. It’s good that the speeds and efficiency are improving, but apparently CPUs  are improving much slower than GPUs. GPUs computational power for suitable problems (like number crunching) was apriory much higher to start with, but what’s really important is that GPUs are moving much faster i.e. the curve of the speedup is much sharper than that of CPUs.

For about $500 you can get the Nvidia GTX 480 right now with 400+ cores and super fast memory. GPUs in general also require much less space and power and thus are in general much more efficient for heavy number crunching computations than CPUs. Of course GPUs are quite limited in their capabilities and are really suitable for specific tasks, but there are more and more areas where people are starting to employ the power of highly parallel GPU computing with lightweight threads.

There is another caveat with GPU – it’s the slow bus connection. The bus is too slow for the speeds of GPU and there is nothing you can do about it at the moment. One thing that can be done since GPU has so much computing power in parallel, is to compress the data that is passed between the GPU and the rest of the system. 1 to 10 ratio is the standard compression ratio of text, so you can increase the throughput of the bus by a factor of 10 using compression. Of course there is still some overhead and you should make an experiment and see whether this is beneficial in your setup.

Overall though, it seems pretty exciting area at the moment and the true technoratis should definitely pay attention to that area.

It’s been long advocated by software developer luminaries that you have to “eat your own dog food” which means you have to use the software you are producing as extensively as possible to realize the shortcomings and things that are broken. This is the “I am not a fish” category as explained by Seth in the series of the following 3 videos. Extremely valuable series for anyone dealing with user experience.

UPDATE:

I found the following video on google video as one video

If you have “can’t locate tools.jar” error when trying to run “ant”, you’ve come to the right place. The fix is apparently very easy, you have to properly set up the “JAVA_HOME” environment variable to Java JDK. The tools.jar is found in the bin folder of the JDK but you only need to point the JAVA_HOME to your JAVA SDK installation and you should be all set!

Easy, right? Go get them!

If you’ve been experiencing horrendous performance of Eclipse on OS X, or maybe you even did not know that Eclipse actually can run very fast, you’d be surprised to learn that apparently it is very easy to make Eclipse run 4-5 times faster  on OS X with proper settings to your eclipse.ini file.

First I will give you a bit of  background. If you want the gist of it or how to make it fly – just go the end of the post.  So a few days ago, PSU fried on my main desktop development machine. It is a newer Quad Core i5 2.6 machine with 4GB 1066Mhz memory and a standard 7200 RPM drive. Since the machine is dead and I am waiting for a replacement power supply, I had to move to my new and shiny MacBook Pro, which I have recently purchased and which is from the latest batch of the updated MacBooks and is quite powerful. It is also i5 (only dual core though) with the same 4GB of 1066Mhz memory and 5400 HD.

So, yeah, I would say that the systems are pretty close right. Nevertheless, working with Eclipse on OS X felt horrendously slow! I had already noticed this nuance in the past and I thought that the Eclipse is just not meant to fly on Mac-s (oh well…), especially when there are so many different distributions for OS X, it signals that the project is in a shifting phase basically (it is shifting from Carbon to Cocoa) and that you should expect all kinds of problems. I bet many people

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Another interesting short excerpt from the 99% conference. With the summary that we should not be afraid to push the envelope. Everyone – creative artists and more technical people artists.

I’ve seen this video by Seth Godin, who is without any doubt a great thinker and visioner. This presentation by Seth, besides being very informational and interesting is quite extraordinary as well. I can not remember when I’ve seen a better presentation lately. Great usage of visuals and associations!

The presentation made me think about people that are successful and people who are not. And this is absolutely true – successful people ship. I’ve known this for all this time, but this simple 3 words “slogan” so to say never formulated in my head. Intuitively I always felt this but after this presentation it just formed.

Borrowing analogy from Math, shipping is a required condition but not satisfactory, meaning that just shipping you will not necessarily make successful, but if you DO NOT ship you will most definitely NOT be successful.

Again, very inspiring presentation that may be an eye opener for some. Enjoy!