* Posts by Dan Olds

21 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Jun 2016

Why we will not have a unified HPC and AI software environment, ever

Dan Olds

Re: Universal Turing Machine.....

But will it run Crysis? That's the key question, right?

Students smash competitive clustering LINPACK world record

Dan Olds

Re: Dear Mr. Dan Olds

Yeah, you make a good point. I just wanted to point out that I was trying to be funny with that comment - not serious. But if I have to point it out by inserting a "lol", then it's not funny enough to stand on it's own.

Dan Olds
Unhappy

Re: Sacasm...

NO sarcasm meant at all!!! I was trying to give it a 'sports caster' like spin. Sorry if I missed the mark. I'm very happy for the German team and their accomplishments. And I'll be cheering them on when they compete in the US later this year.

Dan Olds
WTF?

Missing the point

You couldn't be more wrong. If you have the time, read the other articles about these competitions. These kids spend months learning how to design a system and optimize the applications for it - while staying under the 3,000 watt power cap.

It's not trial and error, more like testing permutations of hardware, software optimization, and then discovering the best combination. This is highly technical work, particularly for undergraduate students.

Take another look at what they're doing before passing judgement.

Chinese supercomputer newbs smash student cluster-building record

Dan Olds

Re: A little confused

If you get the chance, read some of the other student cluster competition stories I've posted, that will give you a good background on the competition. As to your specific question, the students can optimize the benchmark for their hardware, can select their own libraries, and select their own hardware configurations. In other words, they're not just all running exactly the same configuration of LINPACK or HPCG on their clusters - so it's a real contest.

Straight outta Shandong cluster noobs set new LINPACK world record

Dan Olds

Re: ??

Nope, it's a level playing field here. The kids make their own choices about their mixture of CPUs and GPUs, the sponsors are willing to give them pretty much whatever they can. So it really gets down to their expertise in sizing up the applications they'll be running, matching up the best hardware, and then tuning the os/application to make it run as fast as possible.That's the point.

HPC kids battle each other... oh, and tussle with the world's fastest supercomputer

Dan Olds

The only reason I haven't mentioned it is because I don't have any idea what the hell you're talking about....kidding....

IBM lifts lid, unleashes Linux-based x86 killer on unsuspecting world

Dan Olds

Re: Yes, but how much does it actually cost?

I know what you mean about their pricing in the past, but they showed some significantly lower pricing in their analyst deck and some pretty good compares to HP/Dell TCA and TCO. I think they're willing to take much lower hardware margins in order to make as big a dent in the market as possible. But the proof is in the pudding...and street pricing.

Windows 10 pain: Reg man has 75 per cent upgrade failure rate

Dan Olds

Re: A bad workman always blames his tools

You probably have to be able to write in more than just bullet points for one.

Dan Olds

Nope, that's a good point - all of them are on Windows 7 Pro and working excellently. The only thing I'm really concerned about is security updates. According to the company, that's going to be in 2020, so I should be ok.

I like to have every system running the same o/s if at all possible, but that's a nit. I'm pretty solid with my Windows 7 chops and Windows 10 doesn't look that much different. I guess I would just like a tidier personal infrastructure, but you can't always get what you want. (But you can get what you need - to finish the phrase...)

Dan Olds

Re: The power of suggestion

I know! I'm such a sucker for anything 'free'....

Dan Olds

Re: Why the heck would you wait until the last day?

Yeah, you and all the other people who nailed me for this are right - I shouldn't have waited until the day before the last day. The problem is that I had a bunch of other projects, business things, that I needed to do and that, along with some travel mixed in, got me into procrastination mode up until nearly the last minute. So I do take responsibility for that.

Dan Olds

Re: Windows Upgrade - Best Practice

Yeah, I think that's what I'll end up doing - a clean install, then use the Windows 10 transfer utility to help things along.

Dan Olds

Re: Proof that leaving things to the last minute is just bad IT practice and stupid!

I'm glad that you had a chance to log in and tell me off, mom, I wasn't sure you'd see this article.

Dan Olds

Re: EVGA SR-2

I've had great luck with this board. It's been humming away, sometimes for two weeks at a stretch, with no problems at all. Guess I'm one of the lucky ones. But since EVGA doesn't make this type of board anymore, my Hydra 3.0 system will probably be hosted on Supermicro parts like yours.

Dan Olds

Re: W510 Woes

You lucky bast*rd! I really wanted to get the W510 updated and saw on the web where others have posted that they made it work without a problem - but according to MSFT, mine won't. I'll probably try to upgrade the other three systems with a clean install and transfer programs and settings, but no time for that right now.

WTF is WRF and Clover? Cluster kids use HPC grunt to solve the mystery

Dan Olds

Re: Team South Africa

Yes, the institutions are doing great work, but I know that the CHPC (Center for High Performance Computing) has done a LOT of training with the kids. Happy Sithole and David Macleod have really put in a lot of effort into making the South African team a success - their program is amazing. I'm going to try to put together a feature on how they do it, since I've seen their homegrown challenge up close a couple of times.

Powerful ARMs, heaving racks ... yes, of course it's this year's student cluster-building contest

Dan Olds

Hmm....you'd need to find a way to bolt on a high speed interconnect like IB....but at about 4 watts each, you could probably use 600 of them for your cluster (you need to have some power left over to run disk and network infrastructure). It's going to take a lot of switches, but, hey, Mellanox would probably help out with that.....lol....

It's all fun and games until someone loses a rack*

Dan Olds

Re: NVIDIA 1080 Titan GTX GPU?.

It's a GeForce 1080 card, so as near as I can tell, it IS Pascal based. From what I'm seeing on Amazon and other places, you can buy them but have to wait a few days for delivery. I'm wondering if the Tsinghua boys have some connections in high places and were able to score them early.

Dan Olds

If I were the guy writing the headlines, I'd split my money with you - you definitely had it first....lol

Dano

Nice cluster, kid. But can these supercomputing students actually predict the weather?

Dan Olds

Re: And the software comes from ...?

Damn Ian, you ARE a grumpy old sod. There is plenty of relevance to these competitions, the main proof is because these kids get great jobs in the industry. Participating in these competitions gives the kids real world experience in project management, dealing with vendors, and working in teams - plus experience with optimizing an array of real world HPC applications.

I've done webcasts that you can find here on El Reg that cover some of the applications, application profiling, and other topics, so there is at least some coverage of the software side of things. But this competition is about the kids competing, not about the guys who write the programs they compete on.

There are plenty of software competitions, hackathons, and the like. This isn't one of them. I'm now going to officially suspend you from reading my coverage of these cluster competitions for two weeks, starting right after you read this response.