3 ms·
Ways to Fool the Masses Giving Performance Results on Vector Computers (1991)
- et2o 7y agoWhat's the anecdote about buying a sailboat every year a reference to?
- tangus 7y agoBurning it, actually. It's a legend about how Seymour Cray would design and build a sailboat every year only to burn it afterward, so he could design a better one, or something like that.
- redis_mlc 7y agoAlso, sailing in small wooden boats used to be a thing with STEM folks in the 50's and 60's. If you read any biographies of US physicists of the time, it seems they either all sailed, or had a close scientist friend that owned a boat.
- andrewl 7y agoI'd never heard of him. He's done a lot of interesting stuff, mostly in high performance computing. From his personal page: "Gustafson has recently finished writing a book, The End of Error: Unum Computing, that presents a new approach to computer arithmetic: the unum. The universal number, or unum format, encompasses all IEEE floating-point formats as well as fixed-point and exact integer arithmetic. This approach obtains more accurate answers than floating-point arithmetic yet uses fewer bits in many cases, saving memory, bandwidth, energy, and power." Has anybody read it? https://www.amazon.com/dp/1482239868 https://www.amazon.com/dp/1482239868
- boltzmann_brain 7y agoI only heard of him recently and just went through his presentation about Unums, available on his page. Great stuff, highly recommended. http://www.johngustafson.net/presentations/Unums2.0.pdf http://www.johngustafson.net/presentations/Unums2.0.pdf
- espeed 7y agoSee post from 4 days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20388029 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20388029
- carlsborg 7y agoAmong other things he is famous for what came to be called Gustafson’s law: http://www.johngustafson.net/pubs/pub13/amdahl.htm http://www.johngustafson.net/pubs/pub13/amdahl.htm “Speedup should be measured by scaling the problem to the number of processors, not fixing problem size”
- mark-r 7y agoToo bad Seymour Cray is no longer around to pick on, or to inspire. I was lucky enough to tour the Chippewa Falls facility early on - serial number 5 of the Cray-1 was undergoing final tests before delivery. We were lucky enough to see Seymour in his office. He pointed to a pumpkin on his desk, and declared that it was the Cray-3. His daughter had grown it, and since she knew he was already working on a Cray-2, she decided this would be the Cray-3.