[Links of the Day] 08/10/2019 : #AI , #DeepLearning , & #MachineLearning Hardware accelerators evaluation and benchmark

• Performance and Power Evaluation of AI Accelerators for Training Deep Learning Models : as Deep Learning users seek to squeeze that extra 5% accuracy from their model. They turn to hardware accelerator in order to reduce cost and shorten the training time by order of magnitude. However, not all accelerators are created equals as the authors demonstrate in this paper. 
• MLPerf Benchmark Suite : Benchmark suite for machine learning hardware accelerator [slides / presentation]
• C4 model :  software modelization architecture framework. Help you simplify and clearly describe your software stack by breaking it down into 4 distinct layers: system, containers, components, and code.

[Links of the Day] 16/01/2018 : planetary scale DB - AntidoteDB, Benchmarks for Machine Learning and the hardware running the algorithms

• AntidoteDB : large scale ( planet-scale ) distributed DB system. Competing with the like of cockroachDB or spanner. The core differentiator the architecture heavily rely on CRDT for its core functionality. It is a spin-off from the SyncFree EU research project. Sadly like a lot of EU or research-driven startup spin-off the documentation and website are slightly lacking polish. The architecture reference link is broken and a lot of stuff seems to be work in progress. Common guys! If you want to build a community and a product you really need to pick up the pace. This project has great potential, don't let it go to waste. 
• Machine Learning Benchmarks - Hardware Provider : a very good survey of machine learning benchmark of the current cloud provider. What is even more useful from that benchmark is that you get a cost overview of running ML application. Which is often a big unknown at the moment. 
• DeepMind Control Suite : benchmark suite for machine learning algorithms using a set of continuous control tasks with a standardised structure and interpretable rewards

[Links of the Day] 18/11/2016 : Extreme Scale OS, GPU Stream Benchmark, Neural Net that produce neural net

• Neural Architecture Search with Reinforcement Learning : Neural net that produce neural net. Cool thing is that the authors are able to beat human generated model for text processing and deliver equivalent performance for image processing model. Who needs human anymore.... 
• Extreme-Scale Operating Systems : multi-OS research project at Intel aiming to be the node OS for HPC machine. Intel is trying to deliver a polymorphic OS that can quickly adapt to new software and hardware without the need for specialized solution like it exist commonly on high end HPC systems. To some extend it looks like the Jailhouse system. Where the HW is physically partitioned. A few core are dedicated for management, while the rest are partitioned and are running lightweight kernel (LWK) + application. Note that I really resent Intel for always trying to rename things that are commonly used. LWK are Unikernel dammit.. Anyway its jailhouse + unikernel for HPC. 
• GPU-STREAM : Stream benchmark for GPU, much needed benchmark to understand and quantify memory transfer rate to from global memory device on GPUs.

[Links of the day] 25/04/2016: Approximate computing benchmark suit, Awesome Network analysis and complex network book

• AxBench : This benchmark suite offer 29 carefully selected benchmarks to evaluate the approximate computing capability of a system stack. [paper]
• Awesome Network Analysis : list of resources to construct, analyze and visualize network data.
• Large Scale Structure and Dynamics of Complex Networks : fantastic book providing a unifying picture of complex networks.

Network of U.S. political blogs by Adamic and Glance (2004) (preprint)

Links of the day 29/12/2015: Datavisualization, OS dev book and ICPE15 conf

• Datavisualization.ch : Awesome collection of tools that the people behind Datavisualization.ch, work with on a daily basis and recommend warmly. This is not a list of everything out there, but instead a thoughtfully curated selection of our favorite tools that will make your life easier creating meaningful and beautiful data visualizations. Highly recommended!
• The little book about OS development : ever wanted to make your own OS ? well this book will help you get kick started. And even if you don't want to build your own. This book will give you great insight on the nitty gritty detail of what make your OS tick ( and crash... )
• ICPE 2015 : Technical Program and Conference Schedule, a year old but some nice paper and a lot of slide deck are available on the page. Checkout System-Level Characterization of Datacenter Applications paper or Adrian Cockroft presentation on cloud native optimization.

Links of the day 15/12/2015 : GCHQ graph DB, Cloud Benchmark and racetrack memory

• Gaffer : GHCQ graph engine , note that they release v1 and work on v2. This give you an idea of the technical gap between what we see and what they use.
• Racetrack Memory : this technology has been promised for more than 15 years. It might need 15 more years before it comes to fruition and probably at that time be already obsolete. Lets hope not.
• PerfKit Benchmarker : cloud benchmarker which supports 9 cloud providers, including AliCloud, Amazon Web Services, CloudStack, DigitalOcean, Google Cloud Platform, Kubernetes, Microsoft Azure, OpenStack, Rackspace, as well as the machine under your desk or in your datacenter. It fully automates 26 benchmarks covering compute, network and storage primitives, common applications like Tomcat and Cassandra, as well as cloud-specific services like object storage and managed MySQL.

Links of the day 02 - 04 - 2015

Today's links 02/04/2015: Billing &  payment, #Bitcoin Lightning transactions, Compression benchmark, #unikernel

• Billing & Payments Engineering Meetup II : lots of very interesting talk about the difficulty of processing payements at scale while maintaining compliance and security [first meetup]
• Lightning Networks Part I - Revocable Transactions : very good break down by Rusty Russel of the Lightning Network paper. The promise of this work is exceptional: instant reliable transactions across the bitcoin network.
• Squash Benchmark : compression benchmark with 28 datasets, each of which is tested against 23 plugins containing 39 codecs at every compression level they offer—the number varies by codec, but there are 178 in total, yielding 4,984 different settings. The benchmark is currently run on 8 different machines (with more coming soon!) for a current grand total of 39,872 configurations.
• A VM for every URL: interesting experiment where the author tries to run a single unikernel per URL, not really anything significant can be derived from the experiment but it shows the direction the industry is going for. 

Links of the day 26 - 01 - 2015

Today's links 26/01/2015: #compression, text extraction, #cloud message queue comparison and #benchmarking

• ZSTD : short for Z-Standard ( and not Zombie-STD - dirty mind...), is a new lossless compression algorithm, aiming at providing both great compression ratio andspeed for your standard compression needs. It delivers decompression a rate around ~500 MB/s per core and compressiong rate of 200 MB/s ( so no real time for you).
• Ocropus : when you need to extract text from an image 
• Comparison of Message Queue Architecture on AWS : the short version is that if you are not latency sensitive and don't want to spend too much effort use SQS for job management and Kinesis for event stream processing. On the contrary if latency is critical ELB or RabbitMQs (or beanstalkds) for job management and Redis for event stream processing.
• Flotilla : Automated message queue orchestration for scaled-up benchmarking.

Compression, César 1991

Links of the day 07 - 01 - 2015

Today's links 07/01/2015: #google #cloud #benchmark , #IoT , #CI tales

• The Challenge of Fairly Comparing Cloud Providers and What We're Doing About It : how Google is looking into benchmark solution for cloud and make them relevant within the cloud context by Anthony Voellm, Google 
• Exploring the Protocols of IoT : a look into MQTT and CoAP IoT communication protocols 
• Continuous Delivery Stories : share stories from leading practitioners who’ve been there and report from the trenches.

Links of the day 20 - 10 - 2014

Today's links 20/10/2014 : Deep learning, Distributed System Model Checking, Man in the middle SSL attack, Buffer Bloat Benchmark

• Stanford Unsupervised Feature Learning and Deep Learning Tutorial : everything is in the title :) 
• TLA : Domain specific language for verifying complex and concurrent system by Leslie Lamport.  
• SSLsplit : tool for man-in-the-middle attacks against SSL/TLS encrypted network connections. 
• RRUL test suite : buffer bloat benchmark suit for analyzing network performance under the heavy workloads that typically induce bufferbloat and other networking problems.

Links of the day 25 - 07 - 2014

Today : large datasets tools , Scaling, Regression and HPC benchmark in the cloud

• DAT : data package management open source tool that enables the sharing of large datasets
• Series of  blog post on Scaling ( business - strategy )  by Dave Snowden
• Initial thinking on scaling
• Scaling: merge, match & masticate
• Scaling: of gaps and things
• Scaling: context is all
• Scaling: the perversion of order
• 10 types of regressions : help you decide which type of regression to use depending of the context. 
• HPC cloud Benchmark : AWS , Google and HP helion