Superfast SSDs are coming, but will they be used the right way?

 

Intel, Dell, IBM, EMC, and a host of other component makers and OEMs have announced a partnership aimed at developing a standard interface for PCIe-hosted solid-state disks.

Superfast SSDs are coming, but will they be used the right way?

Conclusion: A Trend Toward 3+ Cores : The Game Rundown: Finding CPU/GPU Bottlenecks, Part 2

 

The feeling we get is that the 768 MB of our Nvidia GeForce GTX 460 graphics card is already starting to feel somewhat insufficient, although it’s still fine for most games, so long as you aren’t cranking up the anti-aliasing. At a 1920×1200 resolution, 8xAA, and 16xAF in a DirectX 11 game, you should aim for at least 1 GB of graphics memory.

Conclusion: A Trend Toward 3+ Cores : The Game Rundown: Finding CPU/GPU Bottlenecks, Part 2

Test from Latex2wp

Look at the document source to see how to strike out text, how to use different colors, and how to link to URLs with snapshot preview and how to link to URLs without snapshot preview.

There is a command which is ignored by pdflatex and which defines where to cut the post in the version displayed on the main page

Anything between the conditional declarations ifblog . . . fi is ignored by LaTeX and processed by latex2wp. Anything between iftex . . . fi is processed by LaTex and ignored by latex2wp.

This green sentence appears only in WordPress

This is useful if one, in desperation, wants to put pure HTML commands in the ifblog . . . fi scope.

Lemma 1 (Main)

Let be a total ramification of a compactifier, then

 

The (modifiable) numbering scheme is that lemmas, theorems, propositions, remarks and corollaries share the same counters, while exercises and examples have each their own counter.

Theorem 2 The adèle of a number field is never hyperbolically transfinite.

Proof: Left as an exercise.

Exercise 1 Find a counterexample to Theorem 2.

Exercise 2 (Advanced) Prove Lemma 1.

Note that accented characters are allowed. Unfortunately, Erdös’s name cannot be properly typeset in HTML. (Note that to get the above approximation, you need to type backslash-H-space-o, rather than backslash-H-{o}. Both are good in LaTeX, but only the second is recognized by LaTeX2WP.)

One can correctly type the names of Håstad, Szemerédi, Čech, and so on.

It is possible to have numbered equations

and unnumbered equations

Unnumbered equations can be created with the double-dollar sign command or with the backslash-square bracket command.

It is possible to refer to equations and theorems via the ref, eqref and label LaTeX commands, for example to Equation (2), to Equation (1), and to Lemma 1 above.

eqnarray* is supported, but not eqnarray:

You can nest a bold text inside an emphasized text or viceversa.

The theorem-like environments theorem, lemma, proposition, remark, corollary, example and exercise are defined, as is the proof environment.

The LaTex commands to type $, %, and & are supported outside math mode, and % and & are supported in math mode as well:

The section symbol § is also supported.

WordPress has trouble if a LaTeX expression containing a symbol, such as is followed by an expression containing a symbol, such as . This is fixed by converting the inequality symbols into “HTML character codes.” Always write the symbols and in math mode.

It it is possible to have tabular environments, both with borders (the border will not be displayed in the LaTeX preview), as in

blog	quality
what’s new	excellent
in theory	poor

and without borders as in

(The tabular environments will be centered in WordPress, but not in the LaTeX preview.)

And it is possible to include a picture so that the pdf file produced with pdflatex imports it from a local image file (which has to be pdf, gif, jpeg, or png) and the WordPress post imports it from a URL.

The image command used to generate the above image has three parameter: a size parameter for either the width or the height, expressed in pixels (if different from the original resolution, the picture will be scaled), a URL for the location of the image (this will be used by WordPress) and a local file name (which will used by pdflatex).

It is possible to have numbered and unnumbered sections and subsections. References to label commands which are not in the scope of a numbered equation or a numbered theorem-like environment will refer to the section number, such as a reference to Section 1 below.

HTML does not have good support for itemized list with descriptors (what one gets in LaTeX using the itemize environment with optional parameters in square brackets after the item commands). We can only offer the following rather ugly rendering:

• Case a. Description of case a
• Case b. Description of case b

Examples of Sections

And Subsections

1. A section

1.1. And a subsection

2. Changing the style

The file latex2wpstyle.py contains several definitions that determine the appearance of the WordPress translation. It should be self-explanatory to change the way sections, subsections, proofs and theorem-like environments are typeset, and to change the numbering scheme for theorem-like environments.

The variable in latex2wpstyle.py contains a list of pairs of strings. For every pair, every occurrence of the first string in the document is replaced by an occurrence of the second before proceeding to the conversion from LaTeX to WordPress. If you want to use simple macros (which do not involve parameter-passing) then edit to add support for your own LaTeX macros. (You will have to define the macros in macrosblog.tex as well, otherwise you will not be able to compile your LaTeX file and preview it.)

Some macros are already defined. For example, backslash-E produces an expectation symbol:

Some more macros (see the LaTeX source)

Web Tools

I spent a lot of time on reading articles on the web. Several web tools are frequently used for organizing my reading/writing:

• Twitter: Anything interesting is posted into Twitter
• Diigo: I started using Diigo and stopped using delicious, because I found Diigo is more powerful. 
• WordPress: My own blog containing my thoughts and comments on technical stuff.

BMW08: Barcelona Multicore Workshop

	Thursday 5th June
8:30	Registration
9:00	Welcome, Mateo Valero, BSC/UPC
9:10	The Rock Architecture, Marc Tremblay, SUN
9:40	Future CPU Architectures:The Shift From Traditional Models, Jesus Corbal, Intel
10:10	Parallel Computing using NVIDIA CUDA, Simon Green, NVIDIA
10:40	Coffee break
11:00	Decoupled Composable Processors, Doug Burger, Microsoft Research
11:30	Programming Heterogeneous Multicore Processors, Peter Hofstee, IBM
12:00	Parallelizing Computer System Simulators, Derek Chiou, UT-Austin
12:30	Lunch
14:00	Design and Implementation of Transactional Constructs for C/C++, Ali-Reza Adl-Tabatabai, Intel
14:30	Making Transactional Memory More Scalable, Maurice Herlihy, Brown U.
15:00	Major Hurdles of Hardware Transactional Memory and Some Solutions, Per Stenström, Chalmers U.
15:30	Coffee break
16:00	Panel “50 Billion Transistor Chips: What should the Hardware provide?”, chaired by Yale Patt, UT-Austin
	Friday 6th June
9:00	European Research in Computing, Panagiotis Tsarchopoulos, European Commission
9:30	Panel “What Terrifies You More: Multicore Hardware or Software?”, chaired by Dan Reed, Microsoft
11:00	Coffee break
11:15	StarSs: Portable Programming for a Fuzzy Multicore Space, Jesus Labarta, BSC/UPC
11:45	UPCRC at Illinois: Making Parallel Programming Synonymous with Programming, Marc Snir, UIUC
12:15	Towards Pervasive Parallelism: Parallel Applications without Parallel Programming, Kunle Olukotun, Stanford U.
12:45	Compiling for Multi, Many and Anycore, Rudi Eigenmann, Purdue U.

METAPOST

One of my favorite tools for drawing graph is METAPOST, which is developed by John Hobby and based on Donald Knuth’s METAFONT.  The graphs generated by METAPOST is much better than the ones generated by Visio.   Moreover, it is easier to describe a graph with mathematical properties in a METAPOST program.  For example, it only took me around 15 minutes to reproduce Langford pairings in Knuth’s book. If Visio were used, it would take much longer time to make everything right.

The reproduction of Langford pairings is here.

Additional Links:

• MetaPost on the Web
• Learning METAPOST by Doing

Daily Readings

I found  some interesting papers/articles on Intel Atom architecture (codenamed Silverthrone):

• ISSCC paper:
• Microprocessor Report on Atom (password required)
• Some articles from web: The Tech Report, Ars Technica
• Wikipedia on Atom
• RWT discussions on Intel Atom’s Hyperthreading performance gain

Daily Readings

• If they mated: Intel and Cray to conceive x86 Linux monster: “With the first Intel-Cray products appearing in the 2010-2011 timeframe, it’s clear that three Intel technologies have caught Cray’s eye: the native 32nm Sandy Bridge microarchitecture, the QuickPath Interconnect (QPI) scheme, and the forthcoming discrete, x86-based graphics product, codenamed Larrabee. Cray will plug all of these components into its SeaStar interconnect fabric, and when combined with Cray Linux they’ll make for an HPC and floating-point monster.”

Additional readings: write-ups from HPC Wire and TG Daily; a paper on SeaStar interconnection; a presentation from Cray on programming model called Casacade

Daily Readings

• Interview with Donald Knuth: “To me, it looks more or less like the hardware designers have run out of ideas, and that they’re trying to pass the blame for the future demise of Moore’s Law to the software writers by giving us machines that work faster only on a few key benchmarks!”