November 15, 2010
Short Updates
Good morning! I was going through my morning email when I got a note from Amazon. Now when one rents compute nodes from them "in the cloud" those nodes can have a pair of NVIDIA Tesla “Fermi” GPUs. The GPUS have a peak of a trillion double precision floating point ops per second. With this Amazon moves into the High Performance Computing arena.
So I had to checking pricing: $2.10/hour for time on one of those nodes. Mind boggling to think a researcher could rent that much number crunching for a couple of bucks per hour. Such horsepower used to require million dollar machines and dedicated staff to maintain it.
Dropped the girls off at school and head to the office. Offered up the Joyful Mysteries and then listened to more of "Interior Castle" the rest of the commute. Stopped at the cafeteria since they have decent breakfast deals at their grill: 2 eggs, sausage, and homefries for <$4. Amazed that when I logged in I only had ~30 emails to triage.
Went with the local GPU hardware team to Thai Chilli in Maynard, MA for lunch - a block from DEC's famous "Mill".
Just realized: In <1 month my website will be 10 years old. A decade of Perl/CSS/HTML/JPEG hacking. (related link)
Left the office a smidge early. Called my dad to check that mom's chemo went okay today. Then listened to "Interior Castle" the rest of the drive north. Went straight to Golds Gym for the Step Circuit class. It was as humid as a sauna in the fitness studio. Now to snarf down a quick dinner before heading to an Opus Dei Circle.
Back home from my Opus Dei Circle where we discussed today's readings and the upcoming Advent season. I have a conference call early tomorrow at 6am so won't be up much longer. Good night all!