While Vince will be leaving the project I'll be staying on for the summer (sadly not graduating until next semester). After a brief hiatus to marathon through finals I'll be resuming work on the project for the summer. This time however besides a change in personnel there will also be a change with me moving from part time (10 hours week) to full time (40 hours per week) which will be an exciting way to experience at how graduate students conduct their research.
Tentative result from one of the machines used to record measurements show not a lot of difference predicting FDTD3d power vs. specjbb (two benchmarks being used to stress the power consumption of the GPU and CPU's). If these results hold for the next sets of analysis on most/all frequencies I'll look at potentially installing some more GPU and CPU-intensive benchmarks. Adding benchmarks could help aid the understanding what about the model is good and bad at in more detail.
In addition to analysis, more data collecting and benchmark experimentation I'll also be looking to improve some of the existing code. A busy summer indeed!
Friday, May 20, 2011
Thursday, May 19, 2011
Morrow, out!
Ok, so the Seacrest reference is terrible in of itself, but it is bitter sweet because this particular blog post will also be my last.
It has been a long year of working towards modeling GPU power consumption, and just as the last week of semester gives way, leaving 9 days before Stephanie and I graduate, we are at the cusp of accomplishing our goal. At times I've wished that French was as easy as coding in PERL, but when I realized that sometimes PERL and the running of our benchmarks come up with things missing out of the blue, and 'fix' themselves after cutting/pasting the same exact code into the script only to have it magically work, I reconsider the ramifications of such a request.
This past week and a half Stephanie has been running the NVidia GPU benchmarks (FDTD3d), stressing the GPU with basic graphics runs, in order to gather data about the power usage of the GPU. In doing so, this kicks out .csv (commea separated values) files that are accessible via Microsoft Excel, as well as R (statistics program), that we can then manipulate and create models with. Creating these models basically tells us that the reading of the GPU power consumption is horrendously inaccurate (as expected), and creates another goal to strive towards - Creating (somewhat) accurate models of GPU power consumption. This will be the goal that Stephanie works towards over the summer.
As for myself? I shall be traveling to my home state of Arizona from the end of July through the middle of September to work a wine harvest (Wine in Arizona...?) in Sonoita, AZ, and then travel back to Rutherford, CA to work another wine harvest until December. After that, the plan is New Zealand or Australia, and then the wine pinnacle of the world, France. How this all relates to CREU? Being involved with CREU has helped me gain the confidence of learning a new way of perspective and thinking (via PERL), as well as the discipline and motivation to learn said language on my own - We didn't take any classes or training courses for it. Because of this experience, I've also gained more confidence in tackling other tasks, such as that of learning French and blending the use of it into my career path; marketing, wine, and computers. Quel bien (How nice) !
It has been a wonderful experience my last year in college, and we certainly couldn't have done reached our goal without the support of CREU, our advisor, Dr. Rivoire, and our hordes and throngs of fans. It has been a pleasure - Thank you and au revoir!
It has been a long year of working towards modeling GPU power consumption, and just as the last week of semester gives way, leaving 9 days before Stephanie and I graduate, we are at the cusp of accomplishing our goal. At times I've wished that French was as easy as coding in PERL, but when I realized that sometimes PERL and the running of our benchmarks come up with things missing out of the blue, and 'fix' themselves after cutting/pasting the same exact code into the script only to have it magically work, I reconsider the ramifications of such a request.
This past week and a half Stephanie has been running the NVidia GPU benchmarks (FDTD3d), stressing the GPU with basic graphics runs, in order to gather data about the power usage of the GPU. In doing so, this kicks out .csv (commea separated values) files that are accessible via Microsoft Excel, as well as R (statistics program), that we can then manipulate and create models with. Creating these models basically tells us that the reading of the GPU power consumption is horrendously inaccurate (as expected), and creates another goal to strive towards - Creating (somewhat) accurate models of GPU power consumption. This will be the goal that Stephanie works towards over the summer.
As for myself? I shall be traveling to my home state of Arizona from the end of July through the middle of September to work a wine harvest (Wine in Arizona...?) in Sonoita, AZ, and then travel back to Rutherford, CA to work another wine harvest until December. After that, the plan is New Zealand or Australia, and then the wine pinnacle of the world, France. How this all relates to CREU? Being involved with CREU has helped me gain the confidence of learning a new way of perspective and thinking (via PERL), as well as the discipline and motivation to learn said language on my own - We didn't take any classes or training courses for it. Because of this experience, I've also gained more confidence in tackling other tasks, such as that of learning French and blending the use of it into my career path; marketing, wine, and computers. Quel bien (How nice) !
It has been a wonderful experience my last year in college, and we certainly couldn't have done reached our goal without the support of CREU, our advisor, Dr. Rivoire, and our hordes and throngs of fans. It has been a pleasure - Thank you and au revoir!
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
Dude Where's My Data?
Coming down from the high of industry talks, vacationing and socializing with the family, it was back to the binary trenches. Because errors and code bugs never rest!
Parting of using scripts to automate the data retrieval aspect from the benchmarks so we can run them in successive order across controlled frequencies is that when things go wrong...they go missing. No more non-compiling code or segfaults just missing records that aren't apparent even when stalking the logs real time! Recently our error logs were deceptively empty because the data logs were empty as well. The power meter (delightfully from a brand called WattsUp) was fine. Maybe the cable was shorting out? Back to running baseline tests we resolved that the meter hiccuped and settled down to running the few troublesome frequencies one at a time instead of a set. This resolved the problem and began a new one.
Reading is not hard but for some reason it's deceptive when sleep deprived. When the time came to run the benchmarks related to the GPU (as apposed to the troublesome CPU). Well, that didn't run so smoothly either as does any plan when it meets contact with the enemy on the field. Forgetting to rename the tests surprisingly did not harm anything because the test failed after one frequency and only destroyed an otherwise very small dataset that can easily be recovered.
Parting of using scripts to automate the data retrieval aspect from the benchmarks so we can run them in successive order across controlled frequencies is that when things go wrong...they go missing. No more non-compiling code or segfaults just missing records that aren't apparent even when stalking the logs real time! Recently our error logs were deceptively empty because the data logs were empty as well. The power meter (delightfully from a brand called WattsUp) was fine. Maybe the cable was shorting out? Back to running baseline tests we resolved that the meter hiccuped and settled down to running the few troublesome frequencies one at a time instead of a set. This resolved the problem and began a new one.
Reading is not hard but for some reason it's deceptive when sleep deprived. When the time came to run the benchmarks related to the GPU (as apposed to the troublesome CPU). Well, that didn't run so smoothly either as does any plan when it meets contact with the enemy on the field. Forgetting to rename the tests surprisingly did not harm anything because the test failed after one frequency and only destroyed an otherwise very small dataset that can easily be recovered.
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