Posts by UK Jim

The most durable tech is boring, old, and everywhere

Re: In the raw

It is now a few years old, but my blog on the lifetime of Fortran may be relevant (and contains numbers, not just opinions)

https://open.substack.com/pub/cpufun/p/is-fortran-a-dead-language

UK waves £750M supercomputer contract at HPC builders

Re: How much supercomputer does £330m buy?

You can see some of the research that has been enabled by the current machine (Archer2) at https://www.archer2.ac.uk/research/case-studies/

It all looks important and beneficial to me.

If we are serious about retaining and attracting scientists to the UK, we need to ensure that the resources they need are available, and a serious HPC machine is such a resource.

This is not a hype-laden AI machine, but one for running important scientific codes to enable research. (Many of which may even be in Fortran :-) https://cpufun.substack.com/p/is-fortran-a-dead-language)

PLACEHOLDER ONLY Someone please write witty headline here

Beware of tag names

A friend related the story of a bank whose "high net worth" client group managed to send out an email to all of these important clients that started

"Dear $RICH_BASTARD",

...

(syntax may be wrong, but perhaps that was what happened!)

Downfall fallout: Intel knew AVX chips were insecure and did nothing, lawsuit claims

Nice choice of photo to use for this article on the main page.:-)

I really don't think a 486 will have suffered from a problem in AVX! (Heck, we can see in the photo that the last copyright date on the chip is 1992)

I suppose it is, at least, an Intel CPU.

It's official! Arm files for IPO on Nasdaq

Initial Public Offeting!?

<pedantry>

As your article even states in the same sentence in which it says this is an Initial Public Offering, it is not, since Arm was previously listed!

Or are we allowed to claim that every time we do something it is the first time?

</pedantry>

Arm, Intel make it easier to churn out Arm SoCs from Intel fabs

Are they competitors, though?

Glad you said "Intel and Arm are to a certain extent rivals", since that may be true, even though they are not direct competitors.

Consider this beer analogy:

Think of Intel as a brewery; they have their beer recipes and they sell beer but not the recipes, while Arm, sells beer recipes, but doesn't sell beer.

Therefore the two companies are in different (but, admittedly, closely related) markets. If you are thirsty, and need a pint, going to Arm won't help, since if you want a pint of Arm beer you can't buy it from them, but have to go to one of the companies that brews using their recipe. Similarly if you want Intel's recipe, tough luck, they aren't selling it.

Clearly, if everyone decides they like Arm's recipe, that is bad for Intel (just as if everyone likes Intel's recipe that is bad for Arm), but they are not direct competitors. Intel's competitors are the companies enabled by Arm (Ampere. Broadcom, Marvel, ...) not Arm itself

Britain has likely missed the boat for having a semiconductor industry

Re: 4 decades too late

"What sunk Inmos was their building their own chips, instead of going fabless (like ARM effectively did)". Maybe if Inmos had started ten years later this would be true, but the whole initial sales pitch of Inmos was to exploit the step change in manufacturing with the the shift to 10 micron. Inmos achieved that successfully, and were ahead of the world in manufacturing for a few years. (Hence the fact that the Inmos SRAM was dominant and used as the main upgrade between a Cray-1 and a Cray-1S).

What sank Inmos was not the Transputer, but the Thatcher government which hated anything associated with the National Enterprise Board, so dumped Inmos to Thorn-EMI who had insufficient capital, so could not make the required level of investment to grow the company and push forward the manufacturing. Before that sale, Inmos had exceeded its growth plans.

Note, too, that the Transputer was the first processor to include on die memory, which would not have been possible without the Inmos manufacturing ability.

"The certainty of the fab going obsolete" only follows from the lack of investment which brings us back to the decisions of the milk snatcher.

Although the Transputer may have been the most visible Inmos product (exactly because it took the most work to use!), it was not Inmos only (or, maybe even main) product. We manufactured memories (both SRAM, and non-volatile) and a "colour look-up table" (a RAM with onboard D/A converters to generate video signals).

Clustered Pi Picos made to run original Transputer code

You certainly didn't have to write Occam to use a Meiko machine. We had C and Fortran compilers for the Transputers... (I know for sure, as I wrote the code generator for the Fortran compiler [in BCPL, which we also had, of course]).

For every disastrous rebrand, there is an IT person trying to steer away from the precipice

It's not just our business

The Vauxhall Nova did not sell well in Spanish speaking countries.

And the MR2 (m r deux) was seen as sh*tty in France.

Uncle Sam passes comms act that sets aside $750m for the development of OpenRAN

Re: description, please

Decrypting the acronym in para 6 seems rather late! Folk who don't know it will have left by then.

Using the semi-standard style of "phrase {acronym)" (here "Open Radio Access Network (OpenRAN)") at first use seems much more friendly.

Nvidia unveils $59 Nvidia Jetson Nano 2GB mini AI board, machine learning that slashes vid-chat data by 90%, and new super for Britain

Re: Wrong!

TBH I don't care how much AI power it has. There is a well defined measure of High Performance Computing performance (which we hate, but there it is), and if you claim to be "Britain's most powerful publicly known supercomputer", and then quote a position on the Top500 and a Linpack performance number then you are explicitly using that definition. (Which, here, does not support the claim of being the UK's top machine).

If you want to compare "AI power", then that's fine, you;'re very welcome to do that, but whatever you claim there is not comparable with any measure used to evaluate and rate the top supercomputers.

If there was an "AI500" list and recognised AI benchmark to use to rate machines then claiming a position in that is fine. But the claim that performance on FP16 (or BFP16) is comparable with double-precision Linpack is just wrong.

Or, if you prefer: you are absolutely right, NVIDIA is making an apples to tangerines comparison, and that is what I am objecting to!

Wrong!

"The next SuperPOD project is the Cambridge-1 behemoth, planned to be Britain's most powerful publicly known supercomputer"

Umm, no:

"ARCHER2 will have a peak performance estimated at 28 x 10**15 FLOP/s" (https://epsrc.ukri.org/blog/supercomputers-how-archer2-will-increase-the-pace-and-productivity-of-research/#:~:text=ARCHER2%20will%20have%20a%20peak,than%20the%201964%20Cray%20supercomputer.)

vs "eight petaflops of Linpack benchmark performance" (your article).

So Archer 2 is 3.5x more powerful on a the disliked, but standard, measure of HPC machine performance. (And, Archer 2 is "publicly known")

Verity Stob is 'Disgusted of HG Wells': Time, gentlemen, please

Climatic BANG?

"This builds to a climatic BANG!", surely "a climactic BANG" ?

Or was this just thunder...

Swiss super pushes USA off podium in new Top500 Supers list

Titan History

"and in the process bump the “Titan” machine at the USA's Oak Ridge National Laboratory off the podium for just the third time in the history of the TOP500 list of the world's mightiest supercomputers."

Really!? This is the third time that Titan has dropped out of the top 3?

I think what you were trying to say is "and in the process made this only the third time in the history of the list when the USA has no machine in the top 3".

Little ARMs pump 2,048-bit muscles in training for Fujitsu's Post-K exascale mega-brain

Auto vectorization...

While you can force vectorization of that code (as you do by using compiler flags), doing so is not, in general, safe. Consider an invocation of vectorize_this in which a and either b or c point into the same array. (E.g. vectorize_this(&b[1], b, c);). There is now a loop carried dependence and the results generated by the vector code will be different from those generated by the scalar code.

If you know that the code is used without such overlaps, then the right answer is to modify the code and use the "restrict" qualifier on the arguments to inform compiler of that fact. Though then, of course, you can't claim not to have to modify the code!

(FWIW I work for Intel, and this is an issue for everyone...)

Picking apart the circuits in the ARM1 – the ancestor of your smartphone's brain

Since Sophie Wilson has the circuit diagrams, why bother with the reverse engineering!? It's really not *that* long ago, so the people who did this are still around, know what they did, and can explain it if you ask!

Company you never heard of builds 3.4 petaflops super for DOE

Re: since when

Intel acquired the Infiniband assets of Qlogic about a year ago...

http://newsroom.intel.com/community/intel_newsroom/blog/2012/01/23/intel-takes-key-step-in-accelerating-high-performance-computing-with-infiniband-acquisition

(FWIW I work for Intel, but I do not speak for them :-))

SUPERCOMPUTER vs your computer in bang-for-buck battle

Re: What, no phone?

There are a variety of Linpack ports for Android, some results are at http://www.greenecomputing.com/apps/linpack/linpack-by-device/ for instance...