Coronado and the Turk

Steven Guccione

I live across the road from the Coronado Historic Site, it’s on the Colorado River near Bernalillo and I can see it from my front door.  The more I read about the history of the place the more I’m fascinated.

Francisco Vázquez de Coronado turned up in these parts in 1540, a Spanish conquistador looking for gold.  This led to the first hostilities between Europeans and native Americans, called the Tiguex War.

After much loss of life on both sides, Coronado left to pursue his cities of gold on a rumor from a native American he had enslaved.  This slave was called the Turk and he promised he would lead Coronado to the cities of gold.  The Turk was just sending the Spanish on a wild goose chase. There was no gold.  He led Coronado’s group into the Midwest,  into what is Nebraska today.

Patience with the Turk eventually ran out and he was tortured and killed by Coronado, but it ended Coronado’s campaign.  Coronado would eventually fall from his horse, return to Mexico City and die of an infectious disease in his mid-40s.  The Spanish would not return for 39 years.  Today the Turk is remembered as a hero of the pueblo people.

The Supreme Court’s common sense problem

Steven Guccione

Whenever someone says something is “common sense” it is because it lacks a coherent argument and can’t be discussed in some rational way.  It’s right because it “feels” right.  I immediately assume that anything being defended as “common sense” (because it is clearly part of an argument) is false and just a prejudice.  The term should not even be allowed in a court of law.

The Supreme Court’s common sense problem

The Right to Repair

Steven Guccione

I’ve kept up with this over the years (decades?).  The protection mechanisms for anti-piracy have made many devices unrepairable.  Note that this is more of an American problem, that many DRM systems aren’t used in the rest of the world.  What I didn’t realize is that this has begun to reach into places I didn’t expect.  Like John Deere tractors.  From The Conversation.

Today’s bans on DIY repairs of everything from cell phones to tractors grew out of Hollywood’s fear of videotaping

China announces CPU-only exascale supercomputer

Steven Guccione

I spent most of my career in compute acceleration.  Originally this meant FPGAs (reconfigurable logic) but later GPUs.  As I built larger and larger GPU machines using Intel server CPU and Nvidia GPUs the idea of smaller and simpler processors became more appealing.  I’ve been a fan of the Barcelona Supercomputer Center Mount Blanc machine as well as the SpiNNaker at Manchester for some time.

While GPUs won the battle for now, the power consumption and price seem to be pointing back in the direction of smaller, lower power processors, perhaps with more tightly coupled, on-chip, parallel accelerators.

China seems to be moving in that direction with their new 2 Exaflop Lingshen machine using only low-power CPUs.  This machine has only homegrown (Chinese) processors and no GPUS.  This is quite a difference from supercomputers of the last decade or so, as well as all the new AI data centers.

China announces CPU-only exascale supercomputer with 47,000 homemade processors, record 2 Exaflops of performance without GPUs — Lingshen super said to use Huawei Kunpeng servers and no foreign-made components