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I just returned from the 14th SIAM conference on parallel computing in Seattle. I was presenting a SIMD matrix compression algorithm Ive been working on for some applications in quantum chemistry. There were a lot of interesting technical talks but my favorite was a non-technical plenary talk by Horst Simon on energy-efficient computing, [...]

Two thoughts, in particular, stand out. In any sufficiently large field of study:
(a) there is no single person who is an authority, and
(b) at any given moment, there will be many people working independently on the same problem. To anyone who has done any type of research, these are self-evident truths. [...]

The other day I was listening to AT’s “Selected Ambient Works Vol. 2″ and track #2 off the first disc got me thinking. In case you’ve never heard of R.D. James (aka Aphex Twin), he is an electronic musician. Occasionally he does something nerdy and/or snarky which cracks me up. For example [...]

Today I was reading the slides from Felix von Leitner’s talk on C compiler optimizations (given at the recent Linux Kongress). Basically his point is that there is no point in making your code confusing in an attempt to optimize it b/c usually the resulting object code will not be faster. I’m not [...]

When he was told that Apple Computer had just bought a Cray to help design the next Apple Macintosh, Cray commented that he had just bought a Macintosh to design the next Cray.
- According to Jim Gray (quoted by C. Gordon Bell in his “Seymour Cray Perspective”)

In my last post I made an off-hand remark about writing tail-recursive code in Python. I thought that I would elaborate on this. Python’s creator, Guido van Rossum, has famously said that he’s not interested in implementing tail recursion in the language- much to the dismay/disgust of functional programmers everywhere. Im [...]

Ive just finished reading Godfried Toussaint’s excellent paper ‘The Euclidean Algorithm Generates Traditional Musical Rhythms’.   As the title suggests, Toussaint explores the applications of Euclid’s famous algorithm for computing the GCD of two integers to algorithmic rhythm generation.  It turns out that if you take a templated version of the algorithm and apply it to [...]