The Tech Random Crap Thread

This is near-insanity what's happening with supercomputers:

That rig purports to get 70 TFLOPS. That's terrifying because that's only 3 orders of magnitude (1000 times less) than the #1 in the WORLD, the Sunway TaihuLight which pulls 90PFLOPS. And this thing could almost sit on your desk. Oh, and according to the article: $7,495

This is nuts. It's awesome, but nuts.

Eriol said:

This is near-insanity what's happening with supercomputers:
View attachment 25058
That rig purports to get 70 TFLOPS. That's terrifying because that's only 3 orders of magnitude (1000 times less) than the #1 in the WORLD, the Sunway TaihuLight which pulls 90PFLOPS. And this thing could almost sit on your desk. Oh, and according to the article: $7,495

This is nuts. It's awesome, but nuts.

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This is why gpu prices have skyrocketed. Damn you, cryptocurrency

That's what Intel's Xeon Phi was supposed to deliver. It was supposed to be many dozens of GPx86 cores on a card, so you could effectively have a cluster on a card, and then put many of them in one box.

Also that box is full of GTX 980's. The current 1070 and 1080 cards outclass them (even the 980ti!), so there's still potentially 50% or so more FLOPS to be had, assuming you could source the cards.

--Patrick

PatrThom said:

The current 1070 and 1080 cards outclass them (even the 980ti!), so there's still potentially 50% or so more FLOPS to be had, assuming you could source the cards.

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Case in point.

--Patrick

PatrThom said:

Case in point.

--Patrick

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GH/s is Giga-Hashes per second I assume?

Terrifying either way though. Yikes!

Eriol said:

GH/s is Giga-Hashes per second I assume?
Terrifying either way though. Yikes!

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I don't know which is more terrifying...the number of GH/s, or the fact that it can pull up to 4kW from the wall. "Yikes," indeed.

--Patrick

DarkAudit said:

Found a thread where a guy kept dismissing power costs because he "lived in an apartment" that covered utility costs. Dude, you'll have more to worry about than an an electric bill when the landlord finally figures out it's you.

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Yeah, it's guys like that who come to mind when ISPs say things like, "Our data caps only affect a very small percentage of our users," cuz you know he's the guy who's seeding 50GB/day because "...it's included in the rent."

--Patrick

Eriol said:

This is awesome: Microsoft’s default font is at the center of a government corruption case

(Summary pulled from Slashdot) (Bold mine)
No malfeasance from Microsoft here, but amusing how central fonts can be to things.

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Follow-up to this: Calibri font plays its role: Pakistan now Sans Sharif as Prime Minister is disqualified

Not my pun!

Fascinating: For 20 Years, This Man Has Survived Entirely by Hacking Online Games

Not a huge surprise. I wish he'd done it live on stage though. That would have been awesome.

Patent troll loses in court. No, Personal Audio you didn't invent podcasting. We know it, the EFF knows it, the patent office knows it & now the courts have said they know it too. Now kindly fuck off and die.

About time.
Technology should never be about wringing settlements.
Technology should be about technology.
Hey just make patents like this non-transferrable, problem solved*.

--Patrick
*...and other problems created but whatever

You have my agreement as well. The best performers since the Sandy/Ivy bridges are the Devil's Canyon chips (4790k/4690k) and the desktop Broadwells (5775C/5675C). Everything else has been disappointing.

--Patrick

So my grandpa's old computer has run into an issue where the screen flickers to a blank, light-grey state after booting up past the windows starting screen. The computer still works (autoplay runs an audio disc fine, for example), but the screen refuses to show anything but the grey. No cursor, no icons, no nothing. The screen also doesn't show any of the onboard menus/settings (contrast etc.), so it's not a faulty setting there.

Checked the vga cable, and there was nothing wrong with that (no bent pins, no cable interruptions, etc.). So my first guess was that it's the video card that's burned out for whatever reason (like I said, the computer is pretty old); but it could also be the monitor simply giving up, I guess. My question; how the heck do I test which one it is before we buy a replacement? I don't really have access to either a video card or a spare screen that I can borrow from anybody, which takes the easy answer to that question out of the equation, and if I buy one and it turns out to be the other, that's a waste of money.

Wahad said:

So my grandpa's old computer has run into an issue where the screen flickers to a blank, light-grey state after booting up past the windows starting screen. The computer still works (autoplay runs an audio disc fine, for example), but the screen refuses to show anything but the grey. No cursor, no icons, no nothing. The screen also doesn't show any of the onboard menus/settings (contrast etc.), so it's not a faulty setting there.

Checked the vga cable, and there was nothing wrong with that (no bent pins, no cable interruptions, etc.). So my first guess was that it's the video card that's burned out for whatever reason (like I said, the computer is pretty old); but it could also be the monitor simply giving up, I guess. My question; how the heck do I test which one it is before we buy a replacement? I don't really have access to either a video card or a spare screen that I can borrow from anybody, which takes the easy answer to that question out of the equation, and if I buy one and it turns out to be the other, that's a waste of money.

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No other computer you can lug the screen to, either? Connect it to your laptop or something? The only way to know which of the three (I never rule out the cable and connectors even if they look fine ) is to check them separately.

D'oh. Yeah, alright. That makes sense. Laptop it is.

Wahad said:

D'oh. Yeah, alright. That makes sense. Laptop it is.

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Good luck, hope the laptop has a connector that can hook up to the screen. If it's a relatively modern laptop and an old screen, that may be a problem

figmentPez said:

Is this a CRT? Because if it's an LCD, not even being able to display any control menus pretty much nails down the fault being with the monitor.

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Was gonna say the same thing. Normally has OSD but doesn't now? = monitor problem (at a minimum, I mean it could be both).

--Patrick

fade said:

I sent this to our CTO and our IT guy. Our cluster is getting ancient, and we've taken to renting cycles from a local service. But it's expensive. We're renting 1000 cores, and it's costing us 30K a month. And that's cheaper than AWS, Hadoop, and the like for equivalent service. And we're screwed on replacing ours, because power requirements have gone up, and we're already at the building's limit.

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Good luck then. This seems like quite a lot less than $30k per month, and not insane power requirements either. I hope it does what you need. I just linked it as "wow this is interesting" not "I hope somebody here finds this useful IRL!" But if it is, awesome.

All these tech threads are starting to make me feel like a luddite. Seriously. Several of you have home servers. @PatrThom is installing a server rack in his basement right now. I struggle to play networked games with my wife (who is literally sitting right next to me at the table) if the game or client doesn't set it all up nicely for us like Steam and Minecraft. I was building computers, configuring databases, setting up VoIP services, and writing software 6 years ago and now I feel like a toddler again.[DOUBLEPOST=1503018180,1503018055][/DOUBLEPOST]Oh - and the worst part of it? I can still pick stuff up in a snap, but I have to know which questions to ask/technologies to pay attention to/languages to pick up; and it was honestly like stepping off of a busy sidewalk one day, looking back over, and seeing that the sidewalk had been replaced by the LA interstate.

Gared said:

@PatrThom is installing a server rack in his basement right now.

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That's not me, that's @Tinwhistler, I think. We have a rack installed in the garage and another in the basement, but those are left over from when my father-in-law used to pull Cat3 for the local businesses and school districts, and right now they have antiquated 10Base-T switches installed and so are just used as a glorified patch panel. All I did was get a sweet deal on the build-to-order 12-core version of one of these and jump on it. It's designed to be clamped in such a way that it can be rack-mounted, but I don't intend to do so. I honestly bought it as a workstation to finally be able to clean up/edit video footage (but I might have it running server duty when I'm not doing that, which will honestly be most of the time).

Many years ago, I got another incredible deal when I bought a copy of Shake (List $3000) for just $200(!), and it's truly an amazing piece of software, but running it on a 2GB 1GHz G4 was an exercise in patience. Now I have a 12c machine where each core is > 9x faster than that 1GHz G4 for a potential render speedup of > 110x (minimum!), and thats not including any boost provided by the step up from the modified X800 I have in the G4 to the 5870 in the Pro (Passmark estimates that speedup to be just over 26x) And I'm not even going to get into how much faster file access with a PCIe SSD will be over the G4's now-ancient 500GB ATA133 drive, or how much advantage it will be going from 2GB RAM up to 48 or even 96GB RAM. This computer was literally the exact dream model I ogled while I was suffering through that editing process, which is why I'm so happy to have it. It's also old enough to run the older OS I'll need (10.6) to be able to run this older software "as it was meant to be used."


Mmm, that's a beautiful picture. I hope to test its potential someday.

The biggest obstacle is that I have nowhere to put it at the moment (and of course the RAM and SSD). But that's a question for another day.

--Patrick

Self repairing robots!

Because the robocalyps can't come fast enough.

You're not alone, Gared. I feel like a tech.idiot compared to y'all.

Saw this today on StackOverflow:

Code:

msg[ipos++] = checksum(&msg[1], ipos-1);  // <---- Undefined Behaviour?

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I thought that was really great that the COMPILER caught this. It's quite subtle, but good to know about. I can see other subtle ways this could occur that the compiler would NOT catch (like if ipos was a straight-out by-reference parameter to checksum, and updated inside of it), and so being aware of this kind of thing is good.

There are always exceptions (pun intended), but in general I try and keep the left side of my assignments simple. It's just easier for everybody involved.

I think this is a whole other level that /pizza could be taken to: Domino’s Teams up With Ford on Self Driving Pizza Delivery Cars

Now that Amazon has drones and Whole Foods, I expect food to be drop shipped directly into my mouth.

stienman said:

Now that Amazon has drones and Whole Foods, I expect food to be drop shipped directly into my mouth.

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We all know where this will lead.


--Patrick

fade said:

I sent this to our CTO and our IT guy. Our cluster is getting ancient, and we've taken to renting cycles from a local service. But it's expensive. We're renting 1000 cores, and it's costing us 30K a month. And that's cheaper than AWS, Hadoop, and the like for equivalent service. And we're screwed on replacing ours, because power requirements have gone up, and we're already at the building's limit.

Click to expand...

Perhaps you might find this of use, too.

The new B250 Mining Expert motherboard from ASUS is one of just a handful of motherboards designed specifically for mining, and the only one in the world to pack 19 expansion slots onto a single slab of electronics. All but one of those slots are PCIe Gen 3.0 x1 slots, while the remaining one is a PCIe 3.0 x16 slots.

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I know it's geared more towards mining, but your tech guy(s) might find it interesting as well if you're just looking to glom together a whole bunch of CUDA or something.

--Patrick

Cool charts and graphs! A Tale of Two Industries: How Programming Languages Differ Between Wealthy and Developing Countries

Based on StackOverflow data