Posts by Spunbearing 10 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Oct 2022
True story, the Bigfoot museum is in a Boring Oregon, yes that is the town's name. Fun fact, Boring's sister city is Dull, Scotland. We also have Beavertown, Nimrod, Drain, Climax, Halfway, Butteville, Idiotville and Wankers Corner. I think that as the population moved west they ran out of names.
https://northamericanbigfootcenter.com/
In the field there would be a layered defense to protect vital assets, the more important, the greater the level of defense. As a first line of defense, expensive missiles are being used to take out inexpensive drones. Ammunition implies small arms or guns (like the Phalanx used on ships), that is typically a last resort since it requires a close range engagement.
My understanding is that a field deployed laser would be taking drones out before they are in range of kinetic weapons. The real comparison is Lasers vs missiles. Right now we are spending 10X the cost of drone to take each one out, and the drones can be manufactured in much higher volumes.
It's easier to generate more electricity than is it to replenish conventional weapons. The math is spend more up front for a Laser weapon that reduces the need to use more expensive defenses. If assets are attacked by a drone swarm (think thousands of drones) there won't be time to wait until they are in range of conventional weapons.
Duty cycles are typically at least 10% and shot times in the 10 to 15 second range for these smaller systems. ALso figure the E to O efficiency of a typical laser is in the 50% range, so its 2X input power for shot power. The reality is generating the power needed to run the system is trivial compared to the development work that goes into the rest of the system.
You do know that the Intel lost a suit to DEC for stealing design tech for the Pentium Pro?
New York Times 1997:
"Mr. Palmer said yesterday that Digital offered to license the Alpha chip to Intel in 1991, when Intel was looking to improve the performance of its chips. He said that Intel looked carefully at Alpha before deciding not to use the chip.
When Intel introduced its Pentium Pro chip in November 1995, Mr. Palmer said he was surprised by the new chip's substantial increase in performance. His suspicions grew last August, he said, when Andrew S. Grove, Intel's chief executive, and Craig Barrett, its chief operating officer, seemed to admit in an article in The Wall Street Journal that Intel took its chip designs from others.
''Now we're at the head of the class, and there is nothing left to copy,'' Mr. Barrett was quoted as having said."
https://www.nytimes.com/1997/05/14/business/suit-by-digital-says-intel-stole-pentium-design.html
The employer is bound by privacy requirements to not disclose details regarding the termination. The employee can claim unchallenged whatever they like in the press. Most times behind the smoke screen of the unfair treatment claims you will find a low performing employee that was difficult to work with. To avoid taking a look as to why they were cut they blame everything else. The inability to take responsibility and address their own shortcomings is what gets them on the short list.
They believe their own lie and get to tell their story unchallenged. The fun part is when third parties with an agenda come in. They really don't care about the actual case, they want to make a political statement use these individuals to their advantage. The cases take years to wind through the court system and eventually it comes out that the employee was fired for just cause. In the meantime those with the tiki torches use the case as a rally call to raise money and gain influence. Losses in court? The system was rigged we need to appeal! Case dismissed with prejudice? We are fighting the good fight and the system was rigged! While it is entirely possible that he has a case most large companies have a decent legal staff that knows the rules.
Those backing these type of cases never admit in the media that they ever lost and the long term court battle is a moot point, they are paying to influence opinion (and collect donations); the case is just a vehicle towards that.
Historic context of Intel's ability to work with others' IP and trade secrets:
New York Times, 1997:
"The Digital Equipment Corp. stunned the computer industry and Wall Street Tuesday by filing a lawsuit contending that the Intel Corp. stole some of its patented chip designs to create the popular Pentium microprocessors, the key component in more than 85 percent of the world's personal computers.
In a remarkable suit between an industry star of the present and one of the past, Digital Equipment asked the court to order Intel to stop using Digital technology in its products and demanded triple damages for Intel's "willful infringement" of 10 Digital patents."
"Palmer said Tuesday that Digital offered to license the Alpha chip to Intel in 1991 when Intel was looking to improve the performance of its chips. He said that Intel looked carefully at Alpha before deciding not to use the chip.
When Intel introduced its Pentium Pro chip in November 1995, Palmer said he was surprised by the new chip's substantial increase in performance. His suspicions grew last August, he said, when Andrew S. Grove, Intel's chief executive, and Craig Barrett, its chief operating officer, seemed to admit in an article in The Wall Street Journal that Intel took its chip designs from others."
I'm sure they will be better this time. I'm sure they have been better since learning that lesson and compete on merit. It's not like they are cheating on benchmarks or strong arming partners. Oh wait...
On DEC 24th my wife and I went on a trip to Hawaii. Wife commented how nice and new the plane was... I replied we need to put a will together, who takes care of the dog is we dont come back? I never say stuff like that.
Super weird feeling. I checked and sure enough it was a 737- Max 9. Hard to believe I had a premonition that I was on a Boeing.
And yes it was the plane that lost the plug. Come to think of it, it did seem a bit drafty....
My current workstation is a 5 year old six core (Lenovo P520 Xeon Intel W-2135) that overdue for an upgrade. It's fine on small simulations since the setup takes a lot more time than solving (checking off various buttons and selecting materials). It seems to scale well for what it is. We have a few dual CPU Xeon's (P720's), they have more cores but run at lower clock speeds and don't scale very well. In general the lower core counts with better clock speeds was better. The dual cpu workstations are about 3 years old.
That's what I have been using for most daily tasks.
Last year, Instead of everyone in the department getting a new workstation we decided on a shared resource that we could send our jobs to. For that we got a 64 core Threadripper Pro 5995WX with 512GB of memory set up as a solver. That also saves having to outfit every workstation with a huge amount of memory. On my P520 128GB works just fine as long I I have a solver that I can send large jobs to. Large jobs can easily eat up 250+ GB
When we send medium sized jobs to it, it scales well up until about 20-24 or so cores. A job that took an hour to solve on my older P520 is completed in less than 20 minutes. On large jobs that were taking from 8 to 12 hours to solve on the old systems the 5995WX is typically 3 to 4 times faster and scales well to about 32 to 36 cores. Most of this was informal testing and observations that when re-running a simulation with a changed core count there was a point of diminishing returns.
That corresponded with what I had read before I bought the system. I got the 5995WX for the larger L3 cache (compared with the 32 core version) since that was reported as a 12% improvement at 32 cores compared with the 32 core 5975WX. Jobs that were taking 8 hours are done in 2.5 hours. It lets us see the results and run a couple of iterations in the same workday, my coworkers were super happy with the setup. A single system was plenty for four engineers since the demand is not constant, but when you are in that phase of work you need it. It's managed to cue the jobs up so no more than two jobs run at a time. In the past year we only had one day where that was an issue.
We are getting a second solver to pool resources and adding users to the group.
The short story is that the system scales well to 32 or so cores and me belief is that bandwidth to system memory limits the performance after that. I'm curious to see what the new TR systems with DDR5 will do. From what I have read the newer Xeon's with DDR5 do quite well on CFD and the new 7000 Threadrippers will be a significant improvement. I have been holding off on upgrading my own system waiting for these to be released.
I was OK with my old desktop computer for daily tasks until I decided to setup a simulation on the Threadripper using a remote session. That made my P520 seem really, really slow (because it is).
My goal is to upgrade our local workstations with 24 or so core systems to get better single thread speed for general CAD and reduce setup time and still used pooled solvers to send the jobs to. GPU solvers have been looked at but not tried. A concern is most of our jobs are run using double precision and that does not seem to be a strong point of most GPU solvers. The other is the size of the models require lots of ram or a change in the solve type. The cost to get to a GPU solver that was competitive was considerably higher. I would love to be proven wrong on this and my current TR system has six open GPU bays. Our IT group is supposed to be getting us a GPU demo board to evaluate. The white papers I read were using four GPU's to get some amazing results but the cost was kind of crazy. The double precision thing seems to be a sticking point.
We have one person sending jobs to a cloud based solver. That seems to work OK but there is concern over the extra overhead and sending info outside our local network (he is one of the reasons we are getting another solver). It would be nice to have unlimited budgets and time to try various combos.
Mostly I just want a faster PC!
I'm hoping to get one for a work. I do my design evaluations using Ansys Mechanical workbench and Fluent. Most times we send the job to a solver but the model prep is done on our workstations. Meshing large models can take a while and scales very well with cores. Not too hard to make a case for an upgrade and its nice when you can solve smaller jobs locally. Good single thread performance for poorly threaded loads like Solidworks is a great bonus. I know I want one.
Perhaps a better use of a giant underground network of pipes is a heat source for heat pumps that is more efficient than using air. Heat pumps are gaining popularity but the ROI on going ground based is not good in many areas. This could also be used an adjunct to an air based system for when outside temperatures reduce efficiency. A solution to the issue of limited space for horizontal systems and the cost to excavate (or drill vertical systems).
Its likely that the real value of water in pipe is its heat energy. Two meters down the soil temp is about 11°C, and that thermal energy is available through an existing network of pipes. Imagine using cool tap water instead of 35°C air for a AC systems condenser? In the winter it works once ambient temperatures drop lower that ground temperatures.
Spun
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
