

AMD Contest: What Would You Do With 48 Cores? - 0xdeadc0de
http://blogs.amd.com/work/2010/03/03/48-cores-contest/

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riobard
For some reason, this idea came into my mind: that the existence of this kind
of contests proves either the marketing departments have really trouble
figuring out how to promote many-core processors, or there is no real demand
for these monsters except a few niches.

~~~
viraptor
Couldn't most of games use it for higher complexity graphics? It looks like
people are still not developing for multicore... maybe it's still "too hard"
for an average game developer?

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chipsy
Games face bottlenecks from heavy statefulness. Animations, physics, and AI
have design-required interdependencies where a change in one will trigger a
change in the other - e.g., the player character throws a box, it collides
with an enemy, and the box breaks, while the enemy shows a visible hitreact or
knockback, and possibly changes their future tactics. Sometimes you can queue
and defer all of these changes for a frame and lose some responsiveness, but
other times it's really critical to have them all sync up.

The render stage of graphics benefits from massive parallelization, but most
subsystems can't see the same improvement. A common fallacy of new game
programmers is to think that "one thread per actor" is a clean architecture -
only to discover that each actor's thread blocks the others and causes massive
slowdown.

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fierarul
I would have them sit idle most of the time, since most of my tasks are
usually IO bound.

~~~
Confusion
Add them to a grid, so others can use them when you don't need them?
Seti@home, but where you get paid for your cycles?

~~~
fierarul
Well, it depends how you view the original question.

Sure, you could eventually find some purpose to the 48 cores, but that implies
an active search for such a purpose and basically a side-project. I dunno, I
might just collocate the server and sub-rent virtual machines or do some
shared hosting -- but that's not what I care about.

So -- for my current tools and work-flow, 48 cores isn't needed. Pretty sure
some scientist or video editor might replace his cluster with this thing but
as a normal user and developer I would severely under-utilize the hardware.

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jrockway
Render two chicks at the same time?

~~~
jasonlbaptiste
I just saw this post now and was going to add a comment with something
similar. I wonder how many people's response to any question that begins with:
"What would you do with..." results in an answer of something that includes
the phrase "two chicks at the same time".

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jbellis
Just 16 cores short of having one per chessboard square, like the pioneering
parallel chess machine Hitech...

<https://chessprogramming.wikispaces.com/HiTech?f=print>

[http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.126...](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.126.8874&rep=rep1&type=pdf)

~~~
lsb
As Minsky has said, parallelism isn't worth a damn thing if you don't have
better heuristics to prune the search space.

If you have a million processors to play chess with, and your search tree
still has a branching factor of thirty, you're only looking two moves ahead.

The human mind is amazing because our pattern-matching-based search heuristics
are great.

~~~
xiaoma
Our pattern-matching-based search heuristics are great because the human mind
is amazing.

At least that's how I see it ;)

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jared314
Run a large ant farm. <http://clojure.googlegroups.com/web/ants.clj>

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Locke1689
As an OS developer trying to solve the I/O bottlenecks on 8 cores, probably
cry...

Seriously though? I don't know -- maybe get a bunch of RAM and virtualize 32
machines for some distributed systems research.

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coderdude
The MapReduce tasks I run on Hadoop are heavily CPU bound. This would be a
dream come true, at least until the light bill arrived. I have to wonder, with
so many MR tasks running on a single box, would IO become an issue again?
Suppose you have 12 HDDs and 96 tasks running. At some point the tasks are
going to fight each other for the needle.

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iuguy
Crack passwords and keep my office warm.

Alternatively I'd set up a transcoding farm and build a service to help people
to edit their videos online and download them in multiple formats. My goal
would be something like iMovie but cross-platform with subscription meaning
exclusive filters, wipes and effects with more formats.

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kristianp
Is it a coincidence that the intel cloud-on-a-chip also has 48 cores?
<http://techresearch.intel.com/articles/Tera-Scale/1826.htm> i.e., is it
marketing to the crowd that would want one of those from intel?

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S_A_P
probably the same thing I do with my 8 core mac pro- under utilize it...

~~~
MikeCapone
I have a Mac Pro too, and I know the feeling. Have you looked into distributed
computing (BOINC, etc)? That's how I rationalize it. I see the electricity
bill as part of my donation to science.

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pquerna
write an essay about using that sun t2000s shipped with 64 cores years ago....
well at least its x86 now so you can run more... proprietary binaries?

~~~
melling
Sun wanted to sell you theirs for $$$$. Now that AMD and Intel are at it,
we'll have 8-12 cores for $200 in a few years. Things did seem to slow down a
bit on the multi-core front. I was beginning to wonder what happened.

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TNO
I'd see if I could view flash banner ads efficiently.

~~~
sketerpot
I believe the next version of Firefox will be able to run flash in its own
thread, so having a bunch of extra cores would indeed isolate the evil from
the rest of your browser.

~~~
TNO
I've been running nightly's lately and it does indeed "isolate evil". Instead
of a browser crash I now see a message at the top of the respective page
telling me that the plugin crashed.

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gtani
I know, i'll just learn haskell, scala, clojure, erlang, jocaml and F#. Go
language, too. Then you have 8 problems.

like this guy

[http://www.coderholic.com/12-new-programming-languages-
in-12...](http://www.coderholic.com/12-new-programming-languages-
in-12-months/)

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theschwa
I'm cheap so I would simply use it for an embarrassingly parallel problem. I'd
personally have the most fun with ray tracing or brute force cracking.

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andrewcooke
incidentally, this is a usa/canada competition only -
<http://blogs.amd.com/work/48-cores-official-contest-rules/>

(posting because i was about to put some serious effort into this and suspect
other "foreigners" here might be caught out in the same way)

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romland
I need 42 to find the answer to the Ultimate Question,

the 43rd to satisfy the nerd,

the 44th to find north,

the 45th to bust a myth,

and the 46th idles because nothing rhymes with it

... and well, you finish it.

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MikeCapone
I'd run 48 instances of Rosetta@home.

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CrazedGeek
I'd attempt to run Crysis.

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dirtbox
Calculate pi to 48 places.

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CamperBob
Run a web server?

