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100% agree except that I think courses like this are great for people who want to bluff their way through a job interview to get one of those $150K-$250K big da
by varelse 13y ago
100% agree except that I think courses like this are great for people who want to bluff their way through a job interview to get one of those $150K-$250K big data jobs that are the rage right now (watching Andrew Ng's machine learning lectures beforehand as well would be the pro move in my book). In my experience so far, most of these positions appear to be Java programming gigs where, sadly, issues like SIMD, cache locality, and the GPU are actively ignored or dismissed. Autoboxing alone to use Java generics pretty much destroys any hope of efficient cache use.
I've walked out of job interviews over this sort of thing wherein it's been described as a "performance programming" position for big data and/or machine learning except that everything has to be in Java. And sure, Java performance programming is a thing, but compared to what one can achieve with SIMD, attention to cache-locality and/or running on the GPU for the 20% of the code that eats 80-99% of the cycles, it's laughably uninteresting to me, big bucks aside.
- sanskritabelt 13y agoIt's faster than python and R, dogg.
- varelse 13y agoYou can do extreme performance coding for Java, Javascript, R, Python, Haskell or the language of your choice as long as the number-crunching is done by calling low-level heavily optimized code. For example, PyCUDA: http://mathema.tician.de/software/pycuda/ http://mathema.tician.de/software/pycuda/ And this is where I get told by data scientists that they don't wish to support such code. And IMO that's fine for piddling around and experimentation. But for production, on thousands to hundreds of thousands of servers, running 24/7, at companies with billions and billions of dollars in the bank, that's leaving way too many transistors and electrons on the table for me to stomach. In contrast, here's what you can achieve when you do pay attention to these things: http://istc-bigdata.org/index.php/mapd-a-way-to-map-big-data-faster/ http://istc-bigdata.org/index.php/mapd-a-way-to-map-big-data...
- sanskritabelt 13y agoYou're in a different part of the problem space.