Pet Peeve: Where is the Map?

On Monday, October 22, 2007, Wall Street Journal had a special advertising page, "Investing in Japan" on page A 16. The subtitle was, "Country Offers Opportunities Beyond its Big Cities."

Actually, the page was pretty interesting, talking about the foreign direct investment (FDI) into Japan as a whole and then going into all of the less populated regions that they are trying to get money into. Since the whole premiseof the page was that people are not aware of these places, I am amazed that this advertising page was not accompanied by a map.

This lack is rather common, especially in news articles about obscure countries.

Sam Zell -- Genius or Just Lucky?

October 20 -- 21 2007 article in WSJ page A11 talks about House Sam Zell, the real estate virtuoso at Master investor is supposedly some kind of genius. He built up his company, Equity Office Properties, a real estate investment trust out over decades and sold it to Blackstone for $39 billion in February of 2007. By August, the value of these properties had no doubt plummeted due to the real estate crash.

As a result, and for other reasons I suppose, Zell is considered some kind of genius. But when asked, he says that he did not know that the market was sitting atop. Rather, he says that he felt Blackstone offered him more money for the company than it was worth so he took it. If he's telling the truth, then he avoided disaster in the real estate market by blind luck. The story doesn't look too impressive to me: typical relic, that someone who gets lucky is called a genius.

That was not what happened, in my opinion, when Marty Zweig called the market bottom on Wall Street week before it happened, I believe this was in the early 1980s. He made the call about six months before the actual market bottom and stuck with it the whole time when everyone else in the country felt that stocks were equivalent to the Black plague. He was fully invested through that period. I saw him accumulate gray hairs during that six-month period. That was a combination of genius and guts, something real, not just luck.

Programming the PS3's Cell Processor

I found that excellent article I mentioned in an earlier post about how to program the new Cell processor in the PS3.

Dr. Dobbs Portal, Programming the Cell Processor

"In this article, we present strategies we've used to make a Breadth-First Search on graphs as fast as possible on the Cell, reaching a performance that's 22 times higher than Intel's Woodcrest, comparable to a 256-processor BlueGene/L supercomputer—and all this with just with a single Cell processor! Some techniques (loop unrolling, function inlining, SIMDization) are familiar; others (bulk synchronous parallelization, DMA traffic scheduling, overlapping of computation and transfers) are less so."



Here's another article I just found that is less intensely technical than the above, but also very good.


Cell Architecture Explained Version 2

"It is when the SPEs are working on compute heavy streaming applications that the Cell will be working hardest. It's in these applications that the Cell may get close to it's theoretical maximum performance and perform an order of magnitude more calculations per second than any desktop processor currently available.

On the other hand if the stream uses large amounts of bandwidth and the data blocks can fit into the local stores the performance difference might actually be bigger. Even if conventional CPUs are capable of processing, the data at the same rate the transfers between the CPUs will be held up while they wait for chip to chip transfers. The Cell’s internal interconnect system allows transfers running into hundreds of Gigabytes per second, chip to chip interconnects allows transfers in the low 10’s of Gigabytes per second.

While conventional processors have vector units on board (SSE or VMX / AltiVec) they are not dedicated vector processors. The vector processing capability is an add-on to the existing instruction sets and has to share the CPUs resources. The SPEs are dedicated high speed vector processors and with their own memory don't need to share anything other than the memory (and not even this much if the data can fit in the local stores). Add to this the fact there are 8 of them and you can see why their potential computational capacity is so large."