Friday 28 October 2011

3rd UK GPU Computing Conference

I keep forgetting to post this one: 

3rd UK GPU Computing Conference

I went to the 2009 one in Oxford but missed the 2010 in Cambridge as I just couldn't face the journey in my Landy.

Well worth attending as you get a glimpse of what everyone else is working on in the GPU field. A great source of inspiration for new projects.

The deadline for abstract submission is 18th November.

64-bit ARM server processor

This is very exciting news. A 64bit quad core chip that supports out-of-order execution will, in my opinion, turn the server market on its head.

When these get released I wouldn't even consider using anything else for my server needs. Coupled with the new stuff NVIDIA is doing with ARM or even ARM's own Mali GPU stuff and you will have a very powerful, low power consumption server.

From what I recall  from an interview with the UK's Intel boss on BBC breakfast TV a month or two ago (I cant seem to find the link), he all but admitted they had already lost the mobile market and were going to concentrate on Ultrabooks but said that they still pretty much controlled the server market.

This news should really shake them up a lot. Intel in many aspects has been a victim of their own success and have got locked into an ancient architecture (x86) . Still dont count them out yet, in the past they did come up with some good RISC chips but the market just wasnt there at the time. We may seem them popping out some new architectures in the coming months. They certainly have the manufacturing processes in place and lots of very bright people on board. And as I've written before their compilers are superb.

Read more here at: eetimes.com

Tuesday 25 October 2011

EvoPar 2012 Call for papers

I received an email this morning which may be of interest to some of you in the GPU and GP space:
Just posting an extract here, you can see more on their site.



Part of Evo* 2012, the main European events on Evolutionary Computation:
EuroGP, EvoCop, EvoBio, EvoMusArt and EvoApplications -

11-13 April 2012 - Malaga, Spain
http://www.evostar.org/
EVOPAR: Track on Parallel and Distributed Infrastructures

Submissions are invited on (but not limited to) the following topics:

- Optimization of parallel architectures by means of Evolutionary Algorithms.
- Hardware implementation of EAs, including Field Programmable Gate Arrays
(FPGA), GPU, games consols, mobile devices.
- GPGPU optimisation (CUDA, AMD, ARM, OpenCL, etc., etc.).
- Improving scheduling techniques for peer-to-peer (P2P) and
grid systems or for running distributed EAs and GAs.
- Improving fault tolerance techniques for distributed systems and
distributed EAs capabilities for coping with failures.
- Analytical modelling and performance evaluation of parallel and
distributed infrastructures when running EAs.
- Improvement in system performance through optimisation and tuning.
- Case studies showing the role of parallel and distributed
infrastructures in conjunction with distributed EAs when solving
hard real-life problems.
- Parallel and distributed implementation of genetic algorithms.

IMPORTANT DATES

Submission deadline: 30 November 2011
Notification of authors: 14 January 2012
Camera-ready deadline: 5 February 2012


Track Organisers

F. Fernandez de Vega, University of Extremadura, Spain
W. B. Langdon, University College London, UK

New blog home

BV2 has a new home on blogger (google) as I just couldn't be bothered to run my own backups, email hosting etc etc anymore and the expense of hosting my own server was getting a bit excessive.

The blog has been renamed to ComputeCube as the idea is to merge the two seperate blogs into one, both links should point here.

The automated wordpress->blogger import tool did a good job but some of the image links have broken. I will be working on fixing these. Just to be clear my move to blogger has nothing to do with wordpress. I still think its a really good blogging system, just at the moment my needs are better served here.

Google now pretty much hosts everything of mine. Email, blog and google+ for the social networking thingies. In my push to move with the times I even have a twitter account now (ComputeCube) which contains personal, blog and GPU related stuff.

On the GPU front: I'm still running 2x 8800GT's and a Tesla C1060 but am considering getting a 560Ti as they seem to offer the best price/performance ratio and allow me to use the new CUDA features.

The server crash did knock the wind out of my blogging sails somewhat but since my last post I've not been idle and have implemented a lot of my ideas in CUDA, watch this space for more details.