Comment by transpute
1 year ago
> there is no company running absolutely anything on top of legion
Does Nvidia count?
Supercomputing is on the verge of a breakthrough—computing at the exascale, where a billion billion calculations per second will be the norm. That’s 10 times faster than current supercomputing speeds... Los Alamos scientists, along with colleagues at five other institutions (the Nvidia corporation, the University of California–Davis, Stanford University, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, and Sandia National Laboratories) created a parallel programming system to do just that. The system, called Legion, sifts through an application to determine which tasks can run in parallel, or simultaneously, to save time and boost computing efficiency. [1]
> This is like saying a sketch of a car led to the car.
The ACM Turing Award (computer science equivalent of Nobel Prize) committee believes otherwise.
Beginning in the 1990s, he and his students extended the RenderMan shading language to work in real time on the newly available technology of graphical processing units (GPUs). The GPU programming languages that Hanrahan and his students developed led to the development of widely used standards, including the OpenGL shading language that revolutionized the production of video games. Subsequently, Hanrahan and his students developed Brook, a language for GPUs that eventually led to NVIDIA’s CUDA. The prevalence and variety of shading languages ultimately required the GPU hardware designers to develop more flexible architectures. These architectures, in turn, allowed the GPUs to be used in a variety of computing contexts, including running algorithms for high performance computing applications, and training machine learning algorithms on massive datasets for artificial intelligence applications. [2]
From SIGGRAPH 2004 slides, Stanford's research on Brook was sponsored by Nvidia, ATI, IBM, Sony, U.S. DARPA and DOE. [3]
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20241212055421/https://www.lanl....
[2] https://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/hanrahan_4652251.cfm
[3] https://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/brookgpu/buck.Brook.pdf
> > there is no company running absolutely anything on top of legion > Does Nvidia count?
I don't understand? To prove that NVIDIA ships legion you sent me a link to a LANL post? How does that make sense? Show me a product page on NVIDIA's domain to prove to me that NVIDIA uses this in a product.
> The ACM Turing Award (computer science equivalent of Nobel Prize) committee believes otherwise
You seem to not get what I'm saying: my firm is position is academia doesn't understand absolutely anything in this area. Zero. Zilch. Nada. And absolutely no one in the industry cares either. So given that position, why is this relevant?
The only thing academia is good for is a talent pool of hard-working, smart people. We take those people and then completely retrain them to do actually useful work instead of research nonsense. The vast majority of PhDs coming from academia to industry (yes even from Stanford) literally are horrible software/hardware engineers. Many of them stay that way. The good ones (at least in so far as they care about having a successful career) learn quickly. That's how you get CUDA, which is a product worth a trillion dollars.
Look I've already told you: you workshop at an alter and you've also clearly never worked at a Stanford or an NVIDIA or a LANL. You'll never be convinced because... well I have no idea why people need mythologies to worship.
> Show me a product page on NVIDIA's domain
Legion is research (where _future_ products originate), not yet a product, https://images.nvidia.com/events/sc15/pdfs/SC5117-future-hpc...
> academia doesn't understand absolutely anything in this area. Zero. Zilch. Nada. And absolutely no one in the industry does either.
Would you care to share the names of some software/hardware engineers worthy of emulation by academia and industry?
> Legion is research (where _future_ products originate)
my drawings of spaceships are also where future spaceships come from. it's plausible right? therefore my drawings of spaceships are valuable right?
> Would you care to share the names of some software/hardware engineers worthy of emulation by academia
sorry that was a mistype - i meant to say no one in the industry cares either. engineers in the industry do understand things because they're working on the things every day.
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