
Ways to Fool the Masses Giving Performance Results on Vector Computers (1991) - espeed
http://www.johngustafson.net/fun/fool.html
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andrewl
I'd never heard of him. He's done a lot of interesting stuff, mostly in high
performance computing. From his personal page:

"Gustafson has recently finished writing a book, _The End of Error: Unum
Computing_ , that presents a new approach to computer arithmetic: the unum.
The universal number, or unum format, encompasses all IEEE floating-point
formats as well as fixed-point and exact integer arithmetic. This approach
obtains more accurate answers than floating-point arithmetic yet uses fewer
bits in many cases, saving memory, bandwidth, energy, and power."

Has anybody read it?

[https://www.amazon.com/dp/1482239868](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1482239868)

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carlsborg
Among other things he is famous for what came to be called Gustafson’s law:

[http://www.johngustafson.net/pubs/pub13/amdahl.htm](http://www.johngustafson.net/pubs/pub13/amdahl.htm)

“Speedup should be measured by scaling the problem to the number of
processors, not fixing problem size”

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mark-r
Too bad Seymour Cray is no longer around to pick on, or to inspire.

I was lucky enough to tour the Chippewa Falls facility early on - serial
number 5 of the Cray-1 was undergoing final tests before delivery.

We were lucky enough to see Seymour in his office. He pointed to a pumpkin on
his desk, and declared that it was the Cray-3. His daughter had grown it, and
since she knew he was already working on a Cray-2, she decided this would be
the Cray-3.

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et2o
What's the anecdote about buying a sailboat every year a reference to?

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tangus
Burning it, actually. It's a legend about how Seymour Cray would design and
build a sailboat every year only to burn it afterward, so he could design a
better one, or something like that.

