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AMD Contest: What Would You Do With 48 Cores?
- CamperBob 17y agoRun a web server?
- jrockway 17y agoRender two chicks at the same time?
- jasonlbaptiste 17y agoI just saw this post now and was going to add a comment with something similar. I wonder how many people's response to any question that begins with: "What would you do with..." results in an answer of something that includes the phrase "two chicks at the same time".
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- dirtbox 17y agoCalculate pi to 48 places.
- pquerna 17y agowrite an essay about using that sun t2000s shipped with 64 cores years ago.... well at least its x86 now so you can run more... proprietary binaries?
- melling 17y agoSun wanted to sell you theirs for $$$$. Now that AMD and Intel are at it, we'll have 8-12 cores for $200 in a few years. Things did seem to slow down a bit on the multi-core front. I was beginning to wonder what happened.
- romland 17y agoI need 42 to find the answer to the Ultimate Question, the 43rd to satisfy the nerd, the 44th to find north, the 45th to bust a myth, and the 46th idles because nothing rhymes with it ... and well, you finish it.
- S_A_P 17y agoprobably the same thing I do with my 8 core mac pro- under utilize it...
- MikeCapone 17y agoI have a Mac Pro too, and I know the feeling. Have you looked into distributed computing (BOINC, etc)? That's how I rationalize it. I see the electricity bill as part of my donation to science.
- fierarul 17y agoI would have them sit idle most of the time, since most of my tasks are usually IO bound.
- Confusion 17y agoAdd them to a grid, so others can use them when you don't need them? Seti@home, but where you get paid for your cycles?
- fierarul 17y agoWell, it depends how you view the original question. Sure, you could eventually find some purpose to the 48 cores, but that implies an active search for such a purpose and basically a side-project. I dunno, I might just collocate the server and sub-rent virtual machines or do some shared hosting -- but that's not what I care about. So -- for my current tools and work-flow, 48 cores isn't needed. Pretty sure some scientist or video editor might replace his cluster with this thing but as a normal user and developer I would severely under-utilize the hardware.
- riobard 17y agoFor some reason, this idea came into my mind: that the existence of this kind of contests proves either the marketing departments have really trouble figuring out how to promote many-core processors, or there is no real demand for these monsters except a few niches.
- viraptor 17y agoCouldn't most of games use it for higher complexity graphics? It looks like people are still not developing for multicore... maybe it's still "too hard" for an average game developer?
- chipsy 17y agoGames face bottlenecks from heavy statefulness. Animations, physics, and AI have design-required interdependencies where a change in one will trigger a change in the other - e.g., the player character throws a box, it collides with an enemy, and the box breaks, while the enemy shows a visible hitreact or knockback, and possibly changes their future tactics. Sometimes you can queue and defer all of these changes for a frame and lose some responsiveness, but other times it's really critical to have them all sync up. The render stage of graphics benefits from massive parallelization, but most subsystems can't see the same improvement. A common fallacy of new game programmers is to think that "one thread per actor" is a clean architecture - only to discover that each actor's thread blocks the others and causes massive slowdown.
- Locke1689 17y agoAs an OS developer trying to solve the I/O bottlenecks on 8 cores, probably cry... Seriously though? I don't know -- maybe get a bunch of RAM and virtualize 32 machines for some distributed systems research.
- TNO 17y agoI'd see if I could view flash banner ads efficiently.
- sketerpot 17y agoI believe the next version of Firefox will be able to run flash in its own thread, so having a bunch of extra cores would indeed isolate the evil from the rest of your browser.
- TNO 17y agoI've been running nightly's lately and it does indeed "isolate evil". Instead of a browser crash I now see a message at the top of the respective page telling me that the plugin crashed.
- jbellis 17y agoJust 16 cores short of having one per chessboard square, like the pioneering parallel chess machine Hitech... https://chessprogramming.wikispaces.com/HiTech?f=print https://chessprogramming.wikispaces.com/HiTech?f=print http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.126.8874&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.126...
- dmaz 17y agoI'm glad this has been done :) I thought of the same thing when I first heard of Tilera's TILE64.
- lsb 17y agoAs Minsky has said, parallelism isn't worth a damn thing if you don't have better heuristics to prune the search space. If you have a million processors to play chess with, and your search tree still has a branching factor of thirty, you're only looking two moves ahead. The human mind is amazing because our pattern-matching-based search heuristics are great.
- xiaoma 17y agoOur pattern-matching-based search heuristics are great because the human mind is amazing. At least that's how I see it ;)
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- kristianp 17y agoIs it a coincidence that the intel cloud-on-a-chip also has 48 cores? http://techresearch.intel.com/articles/Tera-Scale/1826.htm http://techresearch.intel.com/articles/Tera-Scale/1826.htm i.e., is it marketing to the crowd that would want one of those from intel?
- CrazedGeek 17y agoI'd attempt to run Crysis.
- jared314 17y agoRun a large ant farm. http://clojure.googlegroups.com/web/ants.clj http://clojure.googlegroups.com/web/ants.clj
- MikeCapone 17y agoI'd run 48 instances of Rosetta@home.
- theschwa 17y agoI'm cheap so I would simply use it for an embarrassingly parallel problem. I'd personally have the most fun with ray tracing or brute force cracking.
- coderdude 17y agoThe MapReduce tasks I run on Hadoop are heavily CPU bound. This would be a dream come true, at least until the light bill arrived. I have to wonder, with so many MR tasks running on a single box, would IO become an issue again? Suppose you have 12 HDDs and 96 tasks running. At some point the tasks are going to fight each other for the needle.
- gtani 17y agoI know, i'll just learn haskell, scala, clojure, erlang, jocaml and F#. Go language, too. Then you have 8 problems. like this guy http://www.coderholic.com/12-new-programming-languages-in-12-months/ http://www.coderholic.com/12-new-programming-languages-in-12...
- andrewcooke 17y agoincidentally, this is a usa/canada competition only - http://blogs.amd.com/work/48-cores-official-contest-rules/ http://blogs.amd.com/work/48-cores-official-contest-rules/ (posting because i was about to put some serious effort into this and suspect other "foreigners" here might be caught out in the same way)
- iuguy 17y agoCrack passwords and keep my office warm. Alternatively I'd set up a transcoding farm and build a service to help people to edit their videos online and download them in multiple formats. My goal would be something like iMovie but cross-platform with subscription meaning exclusive filters, wipes and effects with more formats.