Baltimore in Technicolor

Old and new impressions of Baltimore in Technicolor.
(See this also at Picasa Web Albums.)



More recent impressions:

da Vinci S

Today, the LCSR got a new robot - a da Vinci S from Intuitive.

From Da Vinci S

hp

Here is another aspect of life in America that I haven't understood yet.

Of what use are the large engines, having some three to eight liters of displacement (btw, why is this measured in liters, not in quarts or gallons or fl. oz.?), when one cannot use them anywhere except for a racing-style head start at the traffic lights? Highways are limited to 60 or 70 mph everywhere, and for good reason.

But this results in something else, an experience that is probably unknown to the average American car driver... the feeling of the engine being maxed out, not yielding more power any more, once you have reached the car's top speed, determined by a combination of engine power, wind resistance, and road slope and curvature. The neurons which convey an intuitive feel of this subtle relationship at around 180-220km/h must be missing from an American brain. Or maybe they are used for other things. Maybe marksmanship.

Teraflop

This post's title is not a reference to anything around me (for the record).

Instead, it refers to a performance measure, for the non-computing scientists among the readers. More specifically, a teraflop (or Teraflop, or teraFLOP, or TeraFLOPS, or whatever) means one trillion (that is, 10^12) floating point operations per second. In any case, it is almost a lulz number.

The important part is how fast we got there. In 1999, Apple released the G4 PowerMac, which was touted as "the world's fastest desktop computer ever" and which broke the gigaflop barrier for home computers, at 1-4 Gflops. Less than a decade later, I am sitting in my lab here at Hopkins and am poring over hardware specifications.

The task is to order a single workstation PC for some ultrasound projects in our group. Many of those projects involve lots and lots of correlation computations - elastography or strain imaging is full of them; for 128x2000 ultrasound RF arrays and "small enough" windows, this amounts to a huge number of correlations. So we moved beyond quad-cores, dual-processors, hyperthreading, clustering, and so on - instead the focus is on GPGPU programming (effectively CUDA), or programming a high-performance supercomputation device. Nvidia's Tesla cards are one example of this species, one of which will probably end up in the workstation-class PC, completely dwarfing the computation power of the CPUs inside. A single Tesla C1060, for example, has a performance of nearly one Teraflop, at a price point for a complete system not much higher than $5000. Even a fully-specced 4-card system with almost four Teraflops under your desk clocks in at well below $10k, including dual-Xeons, 16GB of RAM, and friggin' huge monitors.

This is a speedup factor of 1000 within one decade. In this light, that older post sounds very nostalgic.

Canadian English

Click cromulent image to embiggen.

New Words

Sine I came here, I learned a couple of new words. Not at a mindboggling rate, but they keep coming in.
Among these are:

• dive


• tight


• saucy wench

and surprisingly, the correct pronounciation of sewing.
However, I also learned that ebonics is not for the white man.