#2782

Because Everyone Should Have a Hobby

Even if it’s just drinking. In my case that means single malt. Now, I never used to like whisky. This is no longer the case thanks to Nicky. She and I lived with for several years above a doctor’s surgery. And Tom, the aforementioned doctor, whose patients gave him bottles of whisky he didn’t particularly like every Christmas. The solution was remarkably simple. In return for living above the surgery we provided a free single malt disposal service.

This also led to Miller’s Second Law*; Whisky to didn’t pay for tastes better than Whisky you bought. This doesn’t mean that a free bottle of cheap whisky will taste great but it will taste that little bit nicer. Similarly a gratis bottle of Glenmorangie Quinta Ruban’s port finish will definitely taste that little bit fruitier than the same bottle you dropped $65 on.

Some of you might also ask what the hell is a bottle of bourbon doing in there. Well, it’s the spoils of cat sitting for my neighbors last week and I’ve been promising myself that I’d try a few good bottles of American Whiskey just to see what all the fuss is about.

I recently bought 101 Whiskies to Try Before You Die. This seems like a laudable goal in the light of recent events. Plus it’s a lot less effort than some ridiculous bucket list of things I should have done when I was twenty five. All it requires is around $10,000 and a comfy couch to sit in while drinking. The biggest barrier is probably US liquor laws which don’t exactly make things easy.

The Quinta Ruban makes the 101 and deservedly so. I’m already plotting a trip to London and a couple of specialist stores in order to get started on the list.

* I know. This leads to the question what’s the first law? Miller’s First Law; The people you least want to see naked are the ones most likely to take their clothes off. I have a lot of empirical data from numerous European beach vacations to back this up.

Tags: High Performance Computing, Whisky
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HPC Pack SP3 Ships and an Update on LINQ to HPC

Sometimes things just don’t work out the way you’d expect. I mean really, really not the way you expect.

Today Microsoft announced Windows Azure HPC Scheduler and HPC Pack 2008 R2 Service Pack 3 that includes updates to the HPC Pack 2008 R2 and a new Windows Azure HPC Scheduler to allow you to run HPC workloads on Azure! HPC is now a major Azure workload and the HPC team is working hard to enable that for end users and ISV developers.

There’s also an update on the next steps for LINQ to HPC.

As part of this release we’ve also updated the preview version of LINQ to HPC, however, this will be the final preview and we do not plan to move forward with a production release.  In line with our announcement in October at the PASS conference we will focus our effort on bringing Apache Hadoop to both Windows Server and Windows Azure.  Hadoop has emerged as a great platform for analyzing unstructured data or large volumes of data at low cost, which aligns well with Microsoft’s vision for its Information Platform.  It also has a vibrant community of users and developers eager to innovate on this platform.  Microsoft is keen to not only contribute to this vibrant community, but also help its adoption in the Enterprise.  We expect a preview version on Windows Azure available by end of the calendar year.

You can read the full announcement and more about Microsoft’s Big Data strategy and their work with Hadoop at http://microsoft.com/bigdata.

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Tags: Events, High Performance Computing
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What’s up Buttercup?

There’s not been a lot of blogging going on of late… We’re in the final stages of shipping LINQ to HPC (an RC is now available). I’ve been writing samples and documentation, basically dumping what’s in my head into something that the rest of the world can read. Writing is writing, it’s all good.

I also got to write all the samples, which I thought turned out rather well, although you can’t please everyone. I got to write some additional “extras” libraries to make LINQ to HPC even easier to use.

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Tags: Books
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Speaking at BUILD: Analyzing “big data” with LINQ to HPC

For those of you who haven’t figured it out yet I’ll be speaking at BUILD on Friday afternoon.  (2pm session SAC-453T in room 210b).

Analyzing “big data” with LINQ to HPC

"Big data" refers to unstructured data sets so large that they cannot be analyzed using traditional database tools. Today, big data are becoming more common; it is prevalent not just in Web traffic, but also in industries like oil & gas, finance and manufacturing.

Based on Microsoft Research’s Dryad project, LINQ to HPC is a programming model and distributed runtime for building analysis solutions for big data. It goes beyond MapReduce and leverages the LINQ programming model and HPC scheduler to execute optimized query graphs across a cluster of machines.

In this session, you will learn how to use LINQ to HPC on both Windows Azure and an on-premise Windows cluster to build analytic apps that deal with big data. These apps will be able to scale out to hundreds of machines without having to deal with scheduling, data replication and node failure complexities generally associated with programming a large, distributed data-parallel system.

You can find out more about the session on the BUILD web site, this includes the video and slide decks etc.

For those of you who want the code then the Beta 2 release of LINQ to HPC can be downloaded from the HPC Connect site. This includes most of the sample code I show in the talk (with the exception of the back testing example).

Tags: Events, High Performance Computing, Linq, Microsoft, Parallel Computing
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LINQ to HPC (formally DryadLINQ) Ships Beta 2

The HPC team announced their Beta 2 of LINQ to HPC today. You can read more about this here…

Announcing LINQ to HPC Beta 2

We’re pleased to announce the availability of LINQ to HPC Beta 2.

LINQ to HPC enables a new class of data intensive applications for Windows HPC Server by providing a sophisticated distributed runtime and associated programming model for large scale, unstructured data analysis that is easy to use and program. For deeper insights, it integrates with SQL Server 2008, SQL Azure, and the rich portfolio of Business Intelligence offerings from Microsoft such as SQL Server Reporting Services, SQL Server Analysis Services, PowerPivot, and Excel. IT Professionals and developers now have a unified HPC platform that can run both compute and data intensive HPC applications.

The best place to look for updates on what’s going on with LINQ to HPC is the Windows HPC Team Blog (not here). I usually answer support questions in the associated Dryad, DSC and DryadLINQ Forum (not here).

Tags: High Performance Computing, Microsoft
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Running Batch Files on Visual Studio 2010 Project Items

This is something I wrote as an answer on StackOverflow. I dug it out again the other day as I needed it for something else. I have a horrible memory and my blog is essentially just a glorified indexing system for it. Ade’s brain is now, like everything else indexed by Google and Bing and pretty much everyone else.

I’ve updated the steps and, since I completely forgot how to do this, re-tested that they work. So this is slightly more complete that the original SO answer.

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Tags: Coding, Gotchas, Visual Studio
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CUDA 4.0 and VS 2010 Samples Updated for 4.0 release

I finally  got around to updating the RC2 sample/walkthrough to work with the RTM release of CUDA 4.0. No real issues to report thankfully. Nvidia seem to have fixed the issues relating to  conflicts between STL and the Thrust library so things are in better shape now. Maybe I can finally get back to writing some real code not just (endlessly) updating my samples.

Visual Studio 2010 and CUDA

Hopefully there will be some C++ AMP bits to play with soon as I’m really interested in looking at their programming model.

Tags: CUDA, Parallel Computing
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Seattle GPU Meetup

Managed to attend my first Seattle HPC & GPU Supercomputing meetup in Bellevue last night. A lot more people than expected. A couple of interesting speakers from MicroWay and AMD talking about AMD’s latest offerings and experiences with OpenCL.

It’s sort of interesting how far things have come in the last couple of years… When I started playing with CUDA the idea of GPUs for compute was still an oddity. Now they seem to be moving into the main stream at least for some markets and workloads.

Microsoft finally announced C++AMP and the AMD Fusion conference this week which I guess adds more momentum to the space although they haven’t announce when this will ship.

Thanks to Raphael, Andrew et al for putting the meetup together and AMD and MicroWay for sponsoring it.

Tags: Events, GPGPU
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The Adventures of a Manager

Need something to go with that $4 latte? For 99c you can have the collected wisdom of one of the best, if not the best manager I’ve ever worked with. That’s with, not for. If your manager is really any good you feel like you’re working with them not for them.

What’s more, you can read it in about the same time it’ll take you to finish the coffee at a leisurely pace.

The Adventures of a Manager -John deVadoss

An easy read, in fact you can read the entire book in about an hour, what distinguishes this book is its focus on real world lessons learned.

Whether you are looking to move to the next set of challenges in your career as a manager or whether you have just taken on a new role as a manager, you will find here a set of takeaways that may help you become a better manager and leader.

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Tags: Books, p&p
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Parallel Programming Interview

Softtalk in the UK interviewed me about the parallel programming books we wrote at p&p. You can read the interview here:

Interview with Ade Miller

Ade Miller is one of the co-authors of the books ‘Parallel Programming with Microsoft .NET’ and ‘Parallel Programming with Microsoft Visual C++’. Through the magic of email, I caught up with him for a chat about some of the key ideas in the books, including why optimizing hotspots is not the place to start, how .NET and C++ differ in their support for parallel programming, and the role that patterns can play in improving quality and productivity…

Now… Back to shipping Dryad!

Tags: p&p, Parallel book, Parallel Computing
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