towerful

joined 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

If you are doing high bandwidth GPU work, then PCIe lanes of consumer CPUs are going to be the bottleneck, as they generally only support 16 lanes.
Then there are the threadrippers, xeons and all the server/professional class CPUs that will do 40+ lanes of PCIe.

A lane of PCIe3.0 is about 1GBps (Byte not bit).
So, if you know your workload and bandwidth requirements, then you can work from that.
If you don't need full 16 lanes per GPU, then a motherboard that supports bifurcation will allow you to run 4 GPUs with 4 lanes each from a CPU that has 16 lanes if PCIe. That's 4GBps per GPU, or 32Gbps.
If it's just for transcoding, and you are running into limitations of consumer GPUs (which I think are limited to 3 simultaneous streams), you could get a pro/server GPU like the Nvidia quadros, which have a certain amount of resources but are unlimited in the number of streams it can process (so, it might be able to do 300 FPS of 1080p. If your content is 1080p 30fps, that's 10 streams). From that, you can work out bandwidth requirements, and see if you need more than 4 lanes per GPU.

I'm not sure what's required for AI. I feel like it is similar to crypto mining, massive compute but relatively small amounts of data.

Ultimately, if you think your workload can consume more than 4 lanes per GPU, then you have to think about where that data is coming from. If it's coming from disk, then you are going to need raid0 NVMe storage which will take up additional PCIe lanes.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (2 children)

https://g2digital.co.uk/

These guys do short depth PCs. I wish I knew where they got their cases from, because they are really nice!
But I haven't found anything decent in the wild (I eventually gave up and got a deeper rack so I can use old r730 servers)

[–] [email protected] 23 points 10 months ago (3 children)

OP has a ridiculous hip-to-shoulder ratio

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

I mean, they are working on adjusting Newtonian dynamics for the situations where gravity between objects is low. This would fix the model for the strange galaxy spin and where 2 stars orbit eachother.
The issue with this is there are too many unknowns as we have a (relatively) fixed point of perspective. But statistical analysis is working on reducing the impact of those unknowns, and there is likely a paper published in the next few months regarding this.

Then, I guess it's a matter of understanding why this applies. And maybe it applies because of dark matter, and it all wraps back round to an undiscovered thing.
Or, perhaps Newtonian dynamics isn't complete but has been accurate enough to withstand all our testing (like taking 9.8 as the value of G on earth, even though it varies across the globe, and the moon/sun/planets also have a miniscule impact. For everything we do on earth, 9.8 is accurate enough)

Dark matter still has strong scientific support, although still undiscovered.
Modifying Newtonian dynamics has so far been disproven.
Both are worthy of pursuing

[–] [email protected] 32 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (12 children)

Yeh, that's how the scientific method works.
Observations don't support a model, or a model doesn't support observations.
Think of a reason why.
Test that hypothesis.
Repeat until you think it's correct. Hopefully other people agree with you.

People are also working on modifying General Relativity and Newtonian Dynamics to try and fix the model, while other people are working on observing dark matter directly (instead of it's effects) to further prove the existing models.
https://youtu.be/3o8kaCUm2V8

We are in the "testing hypothesis" stage. And have been for 50ish years

[–] [email protected] 20 points 11 months ago (1 children)

The metadata is actually quite important.
Sure, chances are it's a "pending WhatsApp message" notification, but not the actual contents of the message.
However, with enough metadata and by surveying traffic from WhatsApp data centers, someone could see User A accessed WhatsApps service, which generated a WhatsApp notification for User B.
That might just be a coincidence, but with enough data and time, the probability that User A is talking to User B can be increased.
If it also shows that Users C, D and E also get notifications at the same time, it is likely that all those users are in a group chat together.
It's called a timing attack.
And perhaps it isn't enough evidence to stand up in court, it can help build the profile of the users, and guide investigations to other possible accomplices.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Oh yeh, things like old looms? That ran on punch cards to program the pattern?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquard_machine
First prototyped in 15th century.
And all the iterations on it in the 18th and 19th century. Very cool tech

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

I mean, that's 40 years ago.
I can understand that their mechanical abilities had peaked, and weren't able to improve on it.
It would be curious to test that against a modern CNCd mechanical analog firing computer, and then test THAT against a modern 128-bit fixed/floating point computer.
I imagine the computer would win

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (4 children)

Yeh, it's crazy right?
This is all just fancy wheels, turned around, odd shaped, made to fit together better.
And the understanding of mathematics, geometry and mechanics makes this massive apparatus of intricately connected pieces - which are relatively easy to understand in isolation - into this thing that can point a gun to be able to hit a moving target.

World War 2 was horrendous. But some of the tech developed is jaw-dropping.
Since then, it's grown exponentially. We are standing on the shoulders of giants!

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago

Eh, I'd say that runout and stiction are their own demons with potentially more bias than those error types :) Not to mention temperature sensitivity -- hot days will give different answers to the equations!

Ha, oh yeh. Good point.
A bit of dirt throwing off the calculations.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 11 months ago (11 children)

The old firing computers from WW2 are cool as hell.
Not just analog, but mechanical analog.
They take 25 inputs, some of which come directly from the spotter scope things, some from the ship itself, and then controls the guns directly.
It's all cams, gears, reciprocating whatsits and stuff.
And because it's analog, there is no quantisation, rounding errors, floating point errors. It's continuously and instantly calculated.
Very cool stuff.
https://youtu.be/s1i-dnAH9Y4

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Probably useful in other applications. A universal joint is used in so many places other than cars

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