fons's comments

fons | 2 years ago | on: Most people with addiction simply grow out of it (2014)

> ONLY A QUARTER OF PEOPLE WHO RECOVER HAVE EVER SOUGHT ASSISTANCE IN DOING SO (INCLUDING VIA 12-STEP PROGRAMS). THIS ACTUALLY MAKES ADDICTIONS THE PSYCHIATRIC DISORDER WITH THE HIGHEST ODDS OF RECOVERY.

Confirmation bias at its best.

fons | 10 years ago | on: CNI for Docker Containers with Weave and Calico

In the case of Weave: encryption, multicast, fault tolerance (fully distributed through a CRDT mesh), integrates beautifully with containers (can be used as a Docker network plugin and provides out-of-the-box service discovery). More over, it's stupidly simple to use and setup (zero-conf, no kv-store required).

Full disclamer: I work at Weaveworks.

fons | 13 years ago | on: IdTech 4, 15% frame rate increase through semiautomatic paralellization

The exercise was more about evaluating what the tool could bring for already-optimized code than about comparing the results against what an expert programmer could achieve manually.

It is true that the application domain of the code chosen for the blog post might be a bit unfortunate in order to make a realistic case. Game engine programmers are usually very good at low level optimizations. Pareon can be used by non-experts though and additionally assist experts in during the task of finding and applying optimizations and paralellization oportunities.

Quoting the blog update [1]:

"Our Pareon tool is not aimed to replace parallelization experts. We want the tool to be useful for any programmer who is looking for paralellization opportunities in either his own code or in code that he is unfamiliar with. A domain expert (game programmer) can probably save some time because of his in-depth knowledge."

Additionally:

"The three additional cores on my four-core machine are only used during part of a rendering cycle. They are sleeping the rest of the time. If I would parallelize other pieces of code in the cycle as well, it would increase utilization and I would expect the frame rate to improve even more."

[1] http://www.vectorfabrics.com/blog/item/accelerating_the_idte...

fons | 13 years ago | on: IdTech 4, 15% frame rate increase through semiautomatic paralellization

The new followup post [1] explains that Pareon indeed partly relies on good coverage:

"Regarding the way Pareon performs its analysis: it relies on instrumentation and therefore coverage is key. The parts of the code of interest should be sufficiently covered. Partly it is the user's responsibility to make sure the right data sets are used. However Pareon helps the user by showing the achieved coverage of the parts you want to parallelize."

[1] http://www.vectorfabrics.com/blog/item/accelerating_the_idte...

fons | 13 years ago | on: IdTech 4, 15% frame rate increase through semiautomatic paralellization

It is not a bug. That effect was already present in the pristine unoptimized code. Quoting Vector Fabrics new blog post [1]:

"Some people wondered if the HUD textures are messed up in the optimized version, because the demo shows that as soon as you get hit by a monster the health and score numbers seem to blow up in your face. The answer is that this is part of the game play and already present in the original unoptimized version."

[1] http://www.vectorfabrics.com/blog/item/accelerating_the_idte...

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