My experiments with CUDA

Those of you who are tracking NVIDIA and GPGPU would be aware of CUDA 2.0 .. well the final version is released and is available on many platforms including Windows Vista. I had been experimenting a bit with CUDA APIs in my spare time on my Fedora 9 machine and 8500 GT card. Though I have a similar setup for my Vista machine, I didn’t take the pain of configuring it on Vista … it looked far simpler for me to use gcc on Fedora 9. I had to make some minor changes to the sample SDK code to compile with the new gcc compiler though.

So what have I done? I merely wrote a small program to add two arrays of limited size. This whole example is very simple demonstration of how to pass data from host CPU to the device (GPU), do the computation on GPU and get back the results. Well a lot of such examples are there in SDK samples .. but you see, if you don’t do it your self, you don’t get it ;-) The source is available here (deceptively called vecdot.tar.gz)… and what is this thing called documentation?

Xming: opensource X sever for windows

I was just searching around to check out for a good X server implementation for Vista, and was surprised to find opensource high quality Xming. If you use your windows box to remotely connect to Linux box and some times need GUI applications for Linux ... this is highly recommended!

MeTA Studio update: the big and small changes

Ok, the big change first. Starting from the current version (MeTA Studio v. 2.0.09102008) a customized version of BeanShell library is being used. This change was largely entitled, because I found that some threading issues are not property handled in the original BeanShell implementation and turn out to be resource hungry when run inside MeTA Studio. This means that from now on MeTA Studio will use a separate source base of BeanShell. In the coming days I will post the updated source base for MeTA Studio which will include the changed BeanShell package source.

Next, a new component for finding-text-as-you-type (see screen shot) is introduced at various places (such as code editor, search result page etc.) so the finding text information and coding becomes easier with in MeTA Studio.

 

For, developers only, a thread monitoring component is added to the “Job notification and query panel –> MeTA Studio Scheduler” panel (see screen shot). This panel will be expanded in future to include more information and control.

Other small changes include a number of bug fixes in various components, especially the Federation framework (hopefully things are better now for discovering peers!).

Finally, as with previous few releases, the current release is also purely online release, means you need to download the latest full binary package (from http://code.google.com/p/metastudio/), and then use the MeTA Studio update service to get this latest update.

 

PS: Please be patient for the latest source release ;-), this will be done in coming few days…

Turing test: will it prove any thing?

Guardian is reporting that six computer programs will answer questions by human volunteers at the University of Reading in a bid to become the first recognized 'thinking' machine, in essence pass the Turing test. To me it appears that it would probably prove nothing, at least for the time being.

For instance, if the “AI” computer programs are coded to follow a particular grammar and semantics,  it can, never be taken as a machine that “thinks”. Over time, humans have evolved their grammar and language, can machines do the same? For the time being, I do not think so. A big example of this is the way SMS text messages are frequently sent [r u tr?, ts is gr8!, i wil cal u l8r!] … can a computer program that is only programmed (or “learn”) how to interpret English, would ever be able to “think” and understand this SMSenglish? I seriously doubt!