I am wondering if engineering simulations for fluids take advantage of GPUs? I studied CFD back in 2005 or so and we used ANSYS Fluent as a solver and it took forever to converge with sufficient accuracy.
If anyone in engineering has insight into this, I'd love to know.
Technically, non-fluid simulations could also be sped up using GPUs? Dynamics, solid state mechanics, thermal simulations, etc.
In my experience from solid mechanics, generally no. I don’t know exactly why, but my guess would be that there’s a significant lag time in development of these packages. They are conservative and heavily favour accuracy to speedy new techniques.
Often they use back-end solvers that are very old. For example I use FEMAP professionally and it’s essentially a pre- and post-professor over NASTRAN, which is way older than me. Adding GPGPU to it would be difficult indeed, and no one will pick a less accurate new solver without it having been robustly proven (it’s a chicken and egg problem, in a way).
Also, GPUs aren’t suited to all problems. You still have the memory limits of GPUs which aren’t as Large as traditional RAM (I see no GPUs with 32-64GB RAM). They’re not the silver bullet people sometimes hope for.
Lastly, the people who do this are surprisingly less overlapping with the flashy new IT development-aware crowd than you’d expect. They’re not Silicon Valley types with their finger on the pulse of the latest and greatest. Most just use PCs as a tool and wouldn’t know the benefits GPGPU could provide. To them, video cards are just video cards.
I understand the difficultly with legacy code, but your opinion about "Silicon Valley" types, etc. is very off putting.
World needs to evolve. Those who do not, disappear.
If there is a way without sacrificing accuracy, then GPU computation would be absolutely amazing. Imagine the productivity boost, time savings, power and infrastructure savings you'd gain by using a GPU (if it is possible that is). Imagine being able to simulate engineering problems in near real time without having to wait for hours for a solver to converge.
I don't have experience in the solvers, but if there is a way to enable GPU computation then why the hell not!? Silicon valley types or not. People who are engaged in CFD (I used to work at Lockheed's flutter dynamics team) are certainly not "old fashioned" as you describe. GPU to them wouldn't just be a "kid's video game toy" - I can assure you having worked with these folks.
Perhaps the main issue is that even if a PDE solver supports distributed CPU parallelism, the distributed block solvers do not typically allow for decoupling to thousands of independent threads that GPUs are good at. Therefore as the PDE problems and solvers are tightly coupled they do not easily parallelize to GPUs and don't allow for simple recompilation with GPU targets. Most often an existing code would require a complete rewrite/redesign (man years of work for big code bases), at least if there are to be any gains to be had. There are new codes coming, particularly in academia, utilizing GPUs. From what I've seen one can expect around 10x improvement switching to GPUs, so it's good, but not magnitudes better considering the work involved.
I found your comment a bit abrasive, yet you’re lacking the grit to support it besides just anecdotal evidence (just as the parent comment).
I have yet another opinion - I’ve seen a wide variety of articles on HN from how to grow fast to how to stay small. We’re not going to stay productive by arguing without data.
If it isn't clear, "dang" is one of the longtime moderators and I'm confident he's seen enough quantity of posts over the years to have an accurate pulse of the HN readership.
There are virtually zero articles giving the advice to "take VC money and grow grow grow" that made it to the front page. (If you have examples, please post them.) The YC fund emphasizes exponential growth startups but in contrast, the HN discussions downgrade it.
This thread's article from Antoine Finkelstein and the DHH posts that I cited are much more popular with the HN crowd. I'm not complaining about it; it's just an interesting observation.
I couldn't disagree with you more. Everyday, I read articles about VC. How to pitch, how to prepare, how to strategize a startup to ensure future growth, scalability, etc.
Quoting the article, "Growth is always a focus for startups, since a startup without growth is usually a failure." This is article doesn't apply to folks who want to stay small (the discussion of this topic ~ 3 people company).
You could have approached your argument a little less strongly - simply stating your opinions. Authoritative didactic statements require data to back it up otherwise it just sounds abrasive and completely unproductive.
>Everyday, I read articles about VC. How to pitch, how to prepare,
Ok, I see the misunderstanding. I wasn't talking about the existence of any VC startup related articles. Yes those do show up on HN. I wasn't talking about those.
I was talking about a very specific type of startup article that would advise you that "staying small is suboptimal and won't make you happy. Instead, if you want to be happy, you must get big by getting VC firms to invest in you." It's the the type of advice that's the opposite of what this article and DHH's articles are about. There are no such articles giving that type of growth-for-happiness advice on HN's front pages.
The "YC’s Essential Startup Advice" that you cited is meant for people who've already bought into the "startup" mindset and is mostly "build product fit" advice and not "growth=happy" advice. It's not a counterpoint to this article's advice nor counterpoint to the popular DHH articles.
(I see that you participated in that previous thread's discussion so it may seem like YC startup advice dominates here. You wanted tactical advice on starting a small business that wasn't AirBnb or Uber and that article didn't cater to that scenario.)
>Quoting the article, "Growth is always a focus for startups, since a startup without growth is usually a failure."
Yes, that quote about "startup=growth" is relevant to YC's and Paul Graham's definition of "startup" so it's their tautological statement in the context of their blog post. It's not advising that entrepreneurs of small businesses will find happiness by chasing growth. Yes, a small bootstrapped business that stays small is another definition of "startup" but that's not the "startup" YC/PG are talking about.
To restate the context of my comment, the gp (onassar) wrote, "I think it's great/important for an article/concept like this to be given some reach."
... which he is agreeing with the advice of the article to avoid VC money to stay "happy". He framed it as if that "happy=small" idea was some "lone voice in the woods" that everybody on HN needs to be reminded of. My point is that onassar must have some false impression because that's already the overwhelming sentiment on HN.
>it just sounds abrasive
Did you also find Daniel Gackle's (dang) comment abrasive?
This kind of thing drives me crazy! But, for a small project that’s not obvious to anyone - this makes sense.
Look at Apple’s full iPhone landing page. It’d be silly to explain at the top “iPhone is a wireless digital communication device.” It’s obvious that dude is wearing glasses that look like AR/VR headset. You ain’t gotta spell it out for people.
It would be silly because everyone knows what an iPhone is. Not everyone knows what Magic Leap is. When I first saw it I couldn’t figure out what it was. Bad website.
Thank you, absolutely fascinating talk. It was hard to develop video games back in the day and just as it was hard to beat those games. What a wonderful era of ingenuity, creativity and passion.
Checking his website, it reeks of narcissism. There are better ways to assert yourself than to do all the corny things he has done on his self promotion website.
Are you honestly slagging a guy off for talking about himself on his resume???
I mean yeah, we computer folk are supposed to be all self deprecating and all. But if there is one place we should stop mumbling and talking ourselves down for a second, that is it.
At some point if you want people to know what you do, you're going to have to tell them.
Of course you should be talking about yourself on your resume but a couple of this that are different here:
- Wtf is up with music
- 51%/49% thing.
- Publicly asking to be hired that reflects poorly on his current job at Google.
- Excessively loud self marketing
why not have a simple site with your accomplishments? Why all the excess bullshit?
I sorta draw the line at autoplaying music. Apart from that, he's done a good job. How many of us are bold enough to put long list of glowing reviews on our resume?
Wow, that site is extremely weird and off-putting. Scroll down to the section "What are people saying about me?" to read what I can only assume is his friends being asked to write promotional blurbs about him. I can understand putting your best foot forward on your résumé, but this is something else.
There is the horrible example of the nice computer company that had called itself by a certain name. [1] They registered their domain in good faith and conducted business. Later, a multi-million dollar car company decided they wanted the domain for the name they choose after Datsun and lawyered up on the mom-and-pop computer company.
It’s an old site, looks like an old site, and only recently (last 5 years or so) started running ads. It has been 15 years since the lawsuit was first filed.
Also don’t forget - we still have to write certain routines in Assembly even after so many years. Number of abstraction layers doesn’t mean complete automation.
Going from high level to low level code will not go away. But, for the most part you would probably try to get something working and then optimize it.
http://wiki.c2.com/?PrematureOptimization
