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Topic Review
Thread Block
A thread block is a programming abstraction that represents a group of threads that can be executed serially or in parallel. For better process and data mapping, threads are grouped into thread blocks. The number of threads varies with available shared memory. 'The number of threads in a thread block is also limited by the architecture to a total of 512 threads per block.' The threads in the same thread block run on the same stream processor. Threads in the same block can communicate with each other via shared memory, barrier synchronization or other synchronization primitives such as atomic operations. Multiple blocks are combined to form a grid. All the blocks in the same grid contain the same number of threads. Since the number of threads in a block is limited to 512, grids can be used for computations that require a large number of thread blocks to operate in parallel. CUDA is a parallel computing platform and programming model that higher level languages can use to exploit parallelism. In CUDA, the kernel is executed with the aid of threads. The thread is an abstract entity that represents the execution of the kernel. A kernel is a small program or a function. Multi threaded applications use many such threads that are running at the same time, to organize parallel computation. Every thread has an index, which is used for calculating memory address locations and also for taking control decisions.
  • 1.6K
  • 29 Nov 2022
Topic Review
IBM Systems Network Architecture
Systems Network Architecture (SNA) is IBM's proprietary networking architecture, created in 1974. It is a complete protocol stack for interconnecting computers and their resources. SNA describes formats and protocols and is, in itself, not a piece of software. The implementation of SNA takes the form of various communications packages, most notably Virtual Telecommunications Access Method (VTAM), the mainframe software package for SNA communications.
  • 1.5K
  • 28 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Cache Placement Policies
Cache is a memory which holds the recently utilized data by the processor. A block of memory cannot be placed randomly in the cache and is restricted to a single cache line by the “Placement Policy”. In other words, Placement Policy determines where a particular memory block can be placed when it goes into the cache. There are three different policies available for placement of a memory block in the cache.
  • 1.5K
  • 06 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Marker-Controlled Watershed for Segmentation of Images
Watershed is a widely used image segmentation algorithm. A grayscale image is considered as topographic relief, which is flooded from initial basins. However, frequently they are not aware of the options of the algorithm and the peculiarities of its realizations. There are many watershed implementations in software packages and products. Even if these packages are based on the identical algorithm–watershed by flooding, their outcomes, processing speed, and consumed memory, vary greatly.
  • 1.4K
  • 07 Jul 2022
Topic Review
LINPACK Benchmarks
The LINPACK Benchmarks are a measure of a system's floating-point computing power. Introduced by Jack Dongarra, they measure how fast a computer solves a dense n by n system of linear equations Ax = b, which is a common task in engineering. The latest version of these benchmarks is used to build the TOP500 list, ranking the world's most powerful supercomputers. The aim is to approximate how fast a computer will perform when solving real problems. It is a simplification, since no single computational task can reflect the overall performance of a computer system. Nevertheless, the LINPACK benchmark performance can provide a good correction over the peak performance provided by the manufacturer. The peak performance is the maximal theoretical performance a computer can achieve, calculated as the machine's frequency, in cycles per second, times the number of operations per cycle it can perform. The actual performance will always be lower than the peak performance. The performance of a computer is a complex issue that depends on many interconnected variables. The performance measured by the LINPACK benchmark consists of the number of 64-bit floating-point operations, generally additions and multiplications, a computer can perform per second, also known as FLOPS. However, a computer's performance when running actual applications is likely to be far behind the maximal performance it achieves running the appropriate LINPACK benchmark. The name of these benchmarks comes from the LINPACK package, a collection of algebra Fortran subroutines widely used in the 1980s, and initially tightly linked to the LINPACK benchmark. The LINPACK package has since been replaced by other libraries.
  • 1.4K
  • 02 Dec 2022
Topic Review
Social Login
Social login is a form of single sign-on using existing information from a social networking service such as Facebook, Twitter or Google, to sign into a third party website instead of creating a new login account specifically for that website. It is designed to simplify logins for end users as well as provide more and more reliable demographic information to web developers.
  • 1.3K
  • 03 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a part of Amazon.com's cloud-computing platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), that allows users to rent virtual computers on which to run their own computer applications. EC2 encourages scalable deployment of applications by providing a web service through which a user can boot an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) to configure a virtual machine, which Amazon calls an "instance", containing any software desired. A user can create, launch, and terminate server-instances as needed, paying by the second for active servers – hence the term "elastic". EC2 provides users with control over the geographical location of instances that allows for latency optimization and high levels of redundancy. In November 2010, Amazon switched its own retail website platform to EC2 and AWS.
  • 1.3K
  • 04 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Leela Chess Zero
Leela Chess Zero (abbreviated as LCZero, lc0) is a free, open-source, and deep neural network–based chess engine and distributed computing project. Development has been spearheaded by programmer Gary Linscott, who is also a developer for the Stockfish chess engine. Leela Chess Zero was adapted from the Leela Zero Go engine, which in turn was based on Google's AlphaGo Zero project. One of the purposes of Leela Chess Zero was to verify the methods in the AlphaZero paper as applied to the game of chess. Like Leela Zero and AlphaGo Zero, Leela Chess Zero starts with no intrinsic chess-specific knowledge other than the basic rules of the game. Leela Chess Zero then learns how to play chess by reinforcement learning from repeated self-play, using a distributed computing network coordinated at the Leela Chess Zero website. (As of January 2022), Leela Chess Zero has played over 500 million games against itself, playing around 1 million games every day, and is capable of play at a level that is comparable with Stockfish, the leading conventional chess program.
  • 1.2K
  • 21 Oct 2022
Topic Review
SAP Converged Cloud
SAP Converged Cloud is a private managed cloud developed and marketed by SAP. It is a set of cloud computing services that offers managed private cloud, based on the OpenStack technology-based public cloud. It is used by SAP's organization for their own internal IT resources to create a mix of different cloud computing environments made up of the Openstack services. It offers compute, storage, and platform services that are accessible to SAP.
  • 1.2K
  • 15 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Atomic Commit
In the field of computer science, an atomic commit is an operation that applies a set of distinct changes as a single operation. If the changes are applied, then the atomic commit is said to have succeeded. If there is a failure before the atomic commit can be completed, then all of the changes completed in the atomic commit are reversed. This ensures that the system is always left in a consistent state. The other key property of isolation comes from their nature as atomic operations. Isolation ensures that only one atomic commit is processed at a time. The most common uses of atomic commits are in database systems and version control systems. The problem with atomic commits is that they require coordination between multiple systems. As computer networks are unreliable services, this means no algorithm can coordinate with all systems as proven in the Two Generals Problem. As databases become more and more distributed, this coordination will increase the difficulty of making truly atomic commits.
  • 1.1K
  • 07 Nov 2022
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