costrouc's comments

costrouc | 9 months ago | on: Edamagit: Magit for VSCode

I use this extension all the time and for the most part it is identical to Magit. It is a little frustrating at times that Edamagit loses focus (unsure why). This extension along with `tuttieee.emacs-mcx` are what allowed me to transition to VSCode and have nearly the same productivity.

costrouc | 6 years ago | on: I Was Wrong about Nix

There is a very good reason. Nix strives to be reproducible. Thus all hardcoded paths in builds have to point somewhere. /nix was chosen.

costrouc | 6 years ago | on: The Configuration Complexity Curse

There is a quite mature configuration language nix that is behind nixpkgs, nixos, and many other projects. Worth checking out for others here that are interested in abstractable configuration langauges. It is a functional lazily evaluated language.

costrouc | 6 years ago | on: Frontier: ORNL's 2021 exascale supercomputer will run on AMD CPUs and GPUs

Word on the street is that Nvidia insisted that they pay the full price for the GPUs this time and were giving them at a discounted rate prior.

costrouc | 7 years ago | on: Monorepos: Please don’t

in my opinion several build systems / package managers have already solved this issue. The answer is that it doesn't matter mono repo vs polyrepo. Look at nixpkgs/nixos/nixpkgs if you are interested

costrouc | 7 years ago | on: Optimising Docker Layers for Better Caching with Nix

I really like this. I think it is a great compromise between the limitations of docker and everything packaged in one file while taking advantage of nix. I'm curious about one other optimization that could be made.

You could instead look at the dependency graph of several nix docker builds and increase the cache reuse even more from that.

costrouc | 7 years ago | on: Limits on Matrix Multiplication

I didn't see in the paper why these methods are not used in practice. There are parallel implementations of strassens algorithm out there (I have written one). Yes they are faster but they do not guarantee stability. Also they are significantly harder to parallelize than block cyclic MM.

costrouc | 7 years ago | on: LyX: combine the power of LaTeX with the ease of use of a graphical interface

I am a fan of LyX but using version control with the resulting tex document is near impossible and does not work well with others editing in a regular text editor. Wonder if anyone else had this experience?

costrouc | 7 years ago | on: PyPy.js: Python in the web browser

Will web assembly have any effect on a future web based python interpreter? Is there one in the works?

costrouc | 7 years ago | on: My favorite things that are coming with Julia 1.0

Python does not make these assumptions. There are Python tools that exist to solve these problems that are equally as powerful as other language's solutions. The two that I believe right now address these problems best are dask and mpi4py. Mpi4py can achieve very low latencies but given that it's based on MPI it can be complex to use. dask is the most user friendly and as a Python user is clearly easier to use than spark. Paired with numba you can get equivalent performance to distributed C programs.

costrouc | 7 years ago | on: How to write efficient matrix multiplication

Matrix multiplication involves moving across one matrix in column order and the other matrix in row order. So it turns out that both row or column ordering make no difference. I think that matrix multiplication is one of the best examples of a deceptivly simple problem. It shows how far ALL code is from peak performance. We can only strive to be within an order or two from peak performance.

costrouc | 8 years ago | on: Outperforming LAPACK with C++ metaprogramming

For those wondering the lapack guys are working on a new version of lapack to run on heterogeneous architecture including gpus. See their work at http://www.icl.utk.edu/research

I have worked with these guys and all I can say is good luck outperforming the highly optimized routines they have written. My bet is that the the guy writing this blog used a non optimized version of lapack.