Ganesh Swami

Amazing set of screenshots from the palantir blog.

Palantir is building an enterprise platform for analysis of financial and intelligence data. Analysts at government agencies across investigative and intelligence realms are experiencing tremendous analytical challenges managing the tidal wave of information that flows across their desks and throughout their knowledge networks. Palantir Government provides a new way of exploring, understanding, and sharing these large sets of structured and unstructured information across departmental and organizational lines. Similarly, Palantir Financial is a powerful new analytical platform for approaching and understanding financial markets. For decades, traders and economists have struggled with conventional financial and statistical software to explore the financial world. With Palantir, analysts directly explore and manipulate dynamic financial concepts. Properties and connections amongst a vast array of time series, time periods, macroeconomic trends and events, and exotic hedge fund strategies can be discovered, published and shared, unlocking organizational knowledge.

I must be on a roll here. For the last few days, I’ve been spitting out about 500 words of coherent, easy to understand text for my coop report. I’ve never enjoyed writing technical documents so much before.

Everytime I intend to write a report, I always start with the LaTeX template that I made. This time, I decided to push the limits of what LaTeX has to offer.

I’ve included some pictures from my half-baked document. Includes pictures of Table of Contents, PDF indexes, Table of Notation, Glossary, and References. All of them cross-referenced and hyper-linked automatically. Click on the images for higher resolution. Resolution is not meant to be able to read the text, it’s still a bunch of FIXMEs.

All mathematics is divided into three parts: cryptography (paid for by CIA, KGB and the like), hydrodynamics (supported by manufacturers of atomic submarines) and celestial mechanics (financed by military and by other institutions dealing with missiles, such as NASA.).

Cryptography has generated number theory, algebraic geometry over finite fields, algebra (the creator of modern algebra, Viete, was the cryptographer of King Henry IV of France), combinatorics and computers.

Hydrodynamics procreated complex analysis, partial derivative equations, Lie groups and algebra theory, cohomology theory and scientific computing.

Celestial mechanics is the origin of dynamical systems, linear algebra, topology, variational calculus and symplectic geometry.

– Vladimir I. Arnold. Polymathematics: is mathematics a single science or a set of arts? In Mathematics: Frontiers and Perspectives. American Mathematical Society, 2000, pp. 403-416.

Vladimir Arnold is one of my favorite authors. He along-with Professor Jerrold E. Marsden must have written some of the best books on mechanics (this one and this one.) I’m writing the section connecting geodesics, metrics and Euler-Lagrange equations and I wasn’t sure how to introduce the material and looked to these books for inspiration.

Wow, feels like just yesterday that Intel announced new SSE4 instructions. AMD today announced new SSE5 instructions. The new instructions include:

• Fused multiply accumulate (FMACxx) instructions
• Integer multiply accumulate (IMAC, IMADC) instructions
• Permutation and conditional move instructions
• Vector compare and test instructions
• Precision control, rounding, and conversion instructions

The Fused-Multiply Accumulate instruction is the most interesting. Architectures like PowerPC and Itanium have had these instructions for a long time. The Itanium processors do the fmac in the same number of cycles as an addition or multiplication. Here’s a paper that describes some elementary functions that can be computed using fmac.

Download the instruction set manual from AMD.

(via insidehpc)

Gear6 is a Silicon Valley startup that just came up with an incredible product — a machine “CACHEfx” that uses standard computer RAM as storage cache. They come in blocks of 250 or 500 GB, and the operating system will virtualize it into a single pool of upto 5 TB.

The box plugs into a standard Gigabit Ethernet link and caches frequently used files. CACHEfx has a latency of less than 500 microseconds. They also have a handy tool to assess the speedup that you’ll gain by using their product.

If my lab had some more money and the need, we could get one of these. Currently, runs of fluidmatch can generate outputs of upto half a gigabyte. Multiply this by a hundred, and simple things like moving or copying files needs to be scheduled for overnight.