
Shazam: Why cloud GPUs finally make sense - mromnia
https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2017/05/Shazam-why-cloud-GPUs-finally-make-sense.html
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arnon
This rundown on Shazam's blog is much more in-depth and less 'marketingy':
[https://blog.shazam.com/moving-gpus-to-google-
cloud-36edb498...](https://blog.shazam.com/moving-gpus-to-google-
cloud-36edb4983ce5)

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fauigerzigerk
This reads like an advert and doesn't actually explain why cloud GPUs finally
make sense.

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jalk
Is this post correct - or is it just too vague to make sense?

It seems wrong to me that they receive audio-fingerprints and do lookups in a
database they host on GPUs. If they have the fingerprint already, why the GPU
and not just a key-value store. I.e. AWS DynamoDB with 40.000.000 of 5Kb
(250gb) large at 1000 reads/s and 100 writes/s costs less than $500 a month
(which is probably comparable to what google cloud can offer). I doubt that
you get a whole lot of beefy GPU instance for that price

It sounds more like they use the GPUs to generate the fingerprints

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sangnoir
> If they have the fingerprint already, why the GPU and not just a key-value
> store.

They do not recieve a fingerprint from a client, just an audio snippet. A
fingerprint for the audio snippet will need to be calculated on the GPU
(probably via some FFT operation) and _then_ matched against a db. It's
probably much faster to do the db matching within GPU memory instead of
shuffling fingerprint values to the CPU first (extra cycles) and doing another
operation to extract a match from a key-value store (extra network calls).

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ape4
Some phones must be powerful enough to process the audio.

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floatboth
Yeah, pretty much all phones these days have relatively powerful GPUs. However
the GPGPU situation is not awesome?? IIRC RenderScript is way more limited
than OpenCL…

Though it seems that what they're doing is _matching against the database_ on
their GPUs, can't do that on the phone without downloading their huge
proprietary dataset :D

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slackingoff2017
Bet they got a good discount in return for that

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renesd
The article seems like a dishonest paid for review. I flagged it for that
reason.

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mavroprovato
The article is on the Google Cloud Platform Blog. What would you except, an
honest and unbiased review?

