Wednesday 30 June 2010

Site Changes

Yes..... I sold out.   There is now a google adwords space on the top right on the sidebar and at the bottom of individual posts.  I went for what I think is the most unobtrusive design they offered.

Google have emailed me adwords related stuff for ages and I have resolutely resisted as this site is in no way a marketing site. However, in the last few months the site and related equipment failures (power supply, hard drive, mail server etc) have cost me quite a bit and hopefully this will help me recoup some of that.

Looking at what they seem to be placing as ads on the pages I have been starting to wonder how good their contextual advertising is... still it's early days.

In related site news the forums are now permanently removed, although there are still some links left over as I write this.  With the amount of spam / hacking etc its just not worth maintaining a forum on a small site like this.

Tuesday 22 June 2010

Catch up

No apologies for the long delays between posts, or even checking the blog. It just has to fit in with life at the moment and there is so much going on!

Those of you who have left comments on the blog and emails for me should have got an answer last night or this morning. A bit of a delay for some of you.  I do apologise for those of you who sent an email and haven't got a reply back. My computer that used to handle all my email died and I haven't had a chance to fix it yet. I think its just the power supply.... hopefully! so will get the emails back in a few weeks when I eventually get around to fixing it.

I've subsequently upgraded my email server - so any forthcoming mails will get to me. 

In development work I've been working on my SPH simulations, and some GP stuff whenever I get a chance. GP stuff is traditionally recursive - well the equation trees anyway and have needed a substantial amount of reworking to get working efficiently on the GPU.

Speaking of recursive.... in order to be Turing Complete (assuming infinite memory for now) do you need to support / include recursion? Some posters on certain forums seem to think it is needed, but personally I can't see why?  Most recursion with a bit of effort can be iterative - although possibly not very pretty or efficient.

For example. A GPU doesn't really support recursion*, but I would consider cuda / GPU combination as Turing complete. Admittedly not very efficient in certain cases - single thread for example. And again ignoring the infinite memory issue.  *You can if you implement your own stack type system in global memory...

I'd be interested in knowing others views on this - email the normal place or comment here :)

To all the regular readers of the blog - anyone else being amazed by the absolute explosion of GPU / CUDA related code / products / hardware.  Very exciting indeed!