State of AMD's ROCm

TL;DR version:  partially working on my laptop, compared with CUDA, which just works.  On the same machine. I have a $work machine with some nice AMD MIXXX kit, but I'm talking about the laptop I am typeing this on.  This is an AMD Omen 2020, with 64…

Real science does not care about your narrative

In the soviet union, early in the 20th century. a political narrative was born.  In it a pseudo-scientist, really, an activist, named Trofim Lysenko decided that it was politically incorrect to study or apply genetics.  He insisted that Lamarckism was the proper, politically correct theory.  And thus a narrative was…

Relearning Maxima (Macsyma)

In undergrad (Stony Brook), I had a math teacher (numerical methods class) who talked about this package he used in his research.  Macsyma was a symbolic math package, sometimes called a computer algebra tool.   Of course, seeing the likely utility of this in some of my courses (I am still…

Backing up decades of data

This is a tale of backing up data.  To date, I have a small-ish 28TB server at home running zfs (finally) on debian 11.5.  This is my local backup target, and I take snapshots of my other systems over to it. Most of my other systems have 1-2TB of…

Annoying people

You know, those idiots who take 2 parking slots.  Or in this case, idiots in the (small) gym that insist they are using 2 machines at once.  Not letting other people use them.  And these are 2 of the more popular free weight stations: a Smith machine, and a dead…

Performance optimizing python for #HPC ...

It sounds strange, as python is not, by any stretch of any imagination, a high performance language.  If you have a great deal of data you are working with, like I do for my $dayjob, and you need to performance optimize your code, you have a few specific options for…

Much ado in the [HPC] world

I've been relatively quiet here on this platform, apart from my wonderful canine son.  I plan to rectify this. At the end of 2022, we have a world where Intel is on the ropes in HPC, it can't deliver on a reliable schedule.  We have AMD…